Elicit

Extract

From the conversation/context/user:

• The held thing — what the user seems to hold but cannot yet express: a taste, an unease, a half-formed idea.
• The work it bears on — what would get built or decided once it's said.

Gate

Proceed only when: the user holds something they cannot yet put into words, and saying it would change what gets built.

Anything else, say which in one plain line — never stage offers anyway:

• A direct question the user could answer would get it said → ask it and proceed with what the answer settles.
• The user has said it, but the words admit two readings that would build different things → use clarify skill.
• The user is missing something already settled, not holding something unsaid → use explain skill.

Draw

1. Never ask for the held thing head-on — the user already can't say it. Pull it out sideways: offer one concrete thing the user can react to — a candidate, a contrast, a small set laid side by side.
2. Make every option something the user has experienced, described by what it looks like, does, or feels like in their situation — never jargon, never a label they'd have to decode, never abstract choices they haven't lived. Never a list of questions.
3. One offer per turn: put it out and wait for the reaction.
4. Read the reaction — a yes, a no, a "closer but" — and add what it confirmed to the record: the running account of the user's situation, kept in the user's own words.
5. Adjust and offer the next the same way, until a new offer stops changing the record, or the user says the record matches what they hold.

If at any point a reaction shows the user would answer a direct question, ask it — don't keep staging offers.

Output

Hand back the record whole: the user's situation, in words the user confirmed as theirs.

Then check whether the record is clear enough to return to the work it interrupted: would anything still unresolved change what gets built?

• Nothing would → proceed with the work.
• A direct question would settle it → ask it, then proceed with the work.
• The words on the record admit two readings that would build different things → use clarify skill.
• The user is missing something already settled → use explain skill.
• A decision the user has committed to stands undefended → use interrogate skill.

The offers are spent once the loop ends — anything further runs under the branch picked here, never as another offer.