The interview step everyone skips
CRIT is a four-part way to talk to AI, built by Geoff Woods. Context, Role, Interview, Task. The first three are ordinary advice. The fourth one, Interview, is the part almost nobody uses, and it is the part worth learning.
The four parts, quickly
Context: tell it the situation before you ask for anything. Who you are, what already happened, what you're trying to get. Role: tell it who to be. A role narrows the answer. Without one you get the average of everybody. Interview: have it ask you questions before it answers. Task: now say what you actually want made.
Why Interview is the whole thing
Most people ask a question and take what comes back. The Interview step flips that around: the AI asks first. That does two things at once. It pulls details out of your head that you never would have thought to type. And it makes you realize how much you actually know about your own problem that you had never written down anywhere.
A business owner who has gone through one good round of this usually understands their own problem better than they did before the AI said a single word back.
What to do with the answers
Answer honestly, even the questions that feel obvious. The obvious ones are usually the ones you have never had to say out loud, which is exactly why they are worth writing down now.
Not every task needs this
Point it at the small number of decisions that actually drive the result. Interviewing yourself for five minutes before a quick, throwaway task just slows you down. Save it for anything you are going to use, send, or build on.
The other half of the rule
Start with friction, not with AI
Before you interview anybody, including yourself, find the thing that is actually slow. AI is the fix sometimes. Sometimes the fix is somewhere else entirely.
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