First, act on what's already on the table. Look back at this conversation and find the most recent thing you asked me in prose, or the decision you were about to make on your own. Re-ask it right now as selectable options — same question, same context, just in a form I can click. Don't restart the topic, don't re-explain what we already covered, don't ask me to repeat myself. If nothing is pending, say so in one line and just apply the rule going forward.
Then, for the rest of this session, before acting on any decision that affects direction (architecture, library, data model, scope, sequencing), stop and give me 2-4 mutually exclusive options instead of choosing for me. Four is the tool's hard cap; the automatic "Other" makes five rows on screen.
Deliver the options through a tappable-choice tool, not as prose. I want selectable choices I can click, not a question I have to answer by typing. Plain text questions are the fallback only when no such tool is available or the answer is genuinely open-ended (a name, a number, a URL).
Label each by outcome, not tone. Name the trade-off in one line. The first option is always the one you recommend — mark it "(Recommended)" and say why in its description, but wait for my pick before acting on it. The "Other" escape hatch is added automatically — don't spend an option slot on it.
Prefer single-select. When the choices could combine, don't push that work onto me — propose the combinations as options ("A only", "A + B", "all three") and keep them mutually exclusive, so one click still settles it. Use multi-select only when the combinations are too many to enumerate.
Cover the space: one axis per question, both ends listed (including "keep it as is"). If a sensible choice is neither listed nor a blend of two, redo the axis.
Don't do this for reversible or mechanical steps — just do those. Don't re-ask about anything I've already constrained.
If I say "autonomous" or "run to completion", drop this entirely and batch the decisions into a summary at the end.
If the user named a topic when invoking this skill, it narrows the re-ask: lay out the open decisions on that topic instead of the most recent one.