Clarifying question
A clarifying question is a follow-up question that resolves missing, uncertain, or ambiguous information needed to determine an appropriate response or action.
Lead Developer Career Guide
The practice of requesting information to clarify needs, resolve uncertainty, or obtain guidance.
- How it is used
- Uses questions to clarify client needs, unblock team work, and learn during unfamiliar assignments or shadowing.
- How deep it goes
- Gives practical questioning tactics and client prompts, but no formal interviewing procedure.
- Examples
- Uses unexplained workplace acronyms, a request listing three prior attempts, and questions for a dissatisfied client.
- What you can do after
- Practice/perform specific questions that surface misunderstandings and help others provide useful guidance.
Read how Lead Developer Career Guide explains clarifying question →
Coding with AI
A question asked to obtain missing information needed to specify a task, audience, tone, or constraint.
- How it is used
- Improves prompts by collecting audience, tone, format, tool, and constraint information before generation.
- How deep it goes
- Demonstrates question categories and places them within a sequential, iterative prompt-refinement process.
- Examples
- Uses an API-request prompt and asks about audience, tone, output format, tools, libraries, and constraints.
- What you can do after
- Apply it to gather missing context and produce more specific prompts for particular uses or AI models.
Related concepts
- active listeningused by · Active listening is a communication technique involving deliberate attention to, interpretation of, verification of, and responsive engagement with another person’s message.
- error handlingused by · Error handling is the practice of detecting, representing, propagating, reporting, and responding to errors or failures during software operation.
- customer problemuses · A customer problem is a difficulty, unmet need, requirement, or desired outcome experienced by a product or service’s intended customers.
- ambiguityaddresses · Ambiguity is a lack of uniquely determined meaning that allows multiple plausible interpretations of information, language, requirements, or situations.
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