Malcolm answered the instrument instead of reviewing it — which makes him the instrument's first real subject. What his 31 answers teach about the questions, and what they reveal about the two-contract design.
A review would have told us what the questions look like; the pilot told us what they do. Headline results:
| # | Finding (evidence) | Action | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| R1 | Two-part questions lose their second half — A1 got the count ("4–5") but not the valence (choice / accident / managing). | A1 becomes an explicit two-step card: count first, then the valence select. | v1.3 |
| R2 | Free-text point allocation produces errors — his C1 listed "learning & growth" twice (10 and 8) and drifted from the category list. | Allocation questions get constrained controls: sliders/steppers that must sum to 100, each category once. | v1.3 |
| R3 | The best pair data came from modifications, not selections — "Version I, but quantify the cost"; "Version I, but something uplifting at the end." | Every reaction pair gains a third affordance: "neither — write the version you'd want," and the elaboration field is promoted, not optional-feeling. | v1.3 |
| R4 | E5's "stop listening" wording elicited literal audio triggers (finger-snapping, shrill voices) rather than phrases in written advice. | Reworded to "specific words, phrases, or framings — in written advice from anyone." (His literal answer still landed useful data: he has no phrase-level triggers, consistent with D5 "No.") | v1.3 |
| R5 | Terse answerers produce un-synthesizable answers — F3: "Yes." with no how. | New mechanic: when an answer is too thin to draft from, the synthesis step may ask one optional follow-up per question — never more. Respects the terse register instead of fighting it. | v1.3 |
| R6 | Cross-referencing is natural — A6: "See my earlier answer about my health dashboard." | Mechanics now state that referencing an earlier answer is supported; synthesis resolves the reference. | v1.3 |
| R7 | He voted Cut on G3 ("what every AI gets wrong") with no answer. | Recommend keep: it's the question that surfaced your core insight, it's skippable, and his empty-cut is itself a valid answer ("nothing comes to mind"). Your arbitration. | keep |
| R8 | The "missing money/revenue pair" question went unanswered — then his F3 follow-up (relayed) revealed something bigger than a framing preference: in revenue projects "the revenue IS the mission" and enjoyment, personal use, and the "done" bar all become negotiable ("Republicans buy shoes, too"). | Resolved better than proposed: new F4 asks everyone whether their rules are mode-conditional (personal build vs. revenue mission) and what stays non-negotiable. Supersedes the framing-pair idea. | v1.4 |
Verbatim set preserved at .claude/dossier-seeds/malcolm-elicitation-2026-07-20.md — deliberately outside docs/ so it doesn't publish to the workbench (it contains personal health/finance context). Sketch, pending his confirmation:
| Axis | Sarah | Malcolm |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery of hard truths | Observation → connection to goals → options | Direct, immediate, quantified |
| Disengagement trigger | Guilt framing (drove incognito sessions) | Flattery ("doesn't help me achieve my goals") |
| Withheld from AI | Yes — new ideas, to avoid feeling criticized | No |
| Streak framing (E4) | Aversive — "broken streak with fur" | Fine — but end on a rally |
| Concurrency | ~several, exploration-driven | 4–5, utility-driven |
Your triggers look opposite but reject the same thing: non-informational interaction. Guilt framing and flattery are both delivery that carries no usable signal — one punishes, one strokes, neither helps. That's the cross-user core the Contract schema can rely on; everything above it is per-user calibration, exactly as designed. Had we baked your framing rules in as defaults, Malcolm's contract would have been wrong on nearly every axis.
When Phase 1 ships, the seed file pre-drafts Malcolm's Advisory Contract — subject to his line-by-line approval per the synthesis→draft→approval mechanic; nothing here is canonical until he approves it. Before then, one honest gap to flag: because he answered a review artifact rather than the real flow, he never saw the typed-skip controls, the allocation sliders, or the follow-up mechanic he indirectly designed — his real elicitation will still be a first run of the actual instrument, and section F (both risk questions cut/unsure) is the area his contract will start thinnest.
.claude/dossier-seeds/ (not published) · feeds Phase 1 of developer-profile-universal.md.