Answering clarifying questions

While OdoMate’s business analyst is turning a description into a spec, it sometimes needs a decision it can’t infer on its own — which approval flow to use, whether a report should include archived records, which view type fits. Instead of burying that in a paragraph, it asks with a question card: a short, click-to-answer form that appears right in the conversation.

Where you’ll see it

The card appears in two conversational stages, both before anything is built or changed:

• Refining a requirement into a spec — right after you submit your initial description (see writing requirements).
• Discussing a change to a module you’ve already generated — before the agent implements it.

It never appears once a run is actually generating or modifying code. Those stages run unattended, with no questions to answer.

Reading the card

1. Each card holds one agent turn’s worth of questions, one at a time. The header names the topic (for example Approval flow), and a counter in the corner reads Question 1 of 3 so you know how many are left.

2. Pick an answer. A question is either single-choice (radio buttons) or multi-choice (checkboxes) — the card renders whichever the agent asked for. If none of the options fit, the Other — describe your own… box below them takes free text instead; typing there on a single-choice question clears whatever radio button you’d picked.

3. Don’t know, or don’t care? Skip — let the agent decide moves to the next question and records that answer as “use your best judgment” — nothing here is a forced choice.

4. After the last question, a Review your answers step lists everything you picked with an Edit link back to each one, plus an optional note field for anything the questions didn’t cover. Submit answers sends the whole batch as a single reply.

Note

You don’t have to use the card at all. Typing a reply in the message box below it works exactly like it always has — the card collapses to “Answered in chat instead” with a Reopen link, available until the agent’s next turn.

What gets sent

Submitting the card doesn’t send one message per question — it aggregates every answer into a single reply, so answering five questions costs one turn of the conversation, not five. What the agent actually sees looks like this:

My decisions:
1. **Approval flow**: Two-step (manager → finance)
2. **Reporting**: Skipped — agent decides

Additional notes: keep it simple for the first version

That’s deliberately readable: it’s what you’d see if you’d typed the answers yourself, so nothing about what was sent to the agent is hidden behind the card. Once submitted, the card collapses to a compact summary (“2 decisions submitted”) and can’t be resubmitted.