Engineering
Six Layers of Context: How Imora Twins Actually Work
Two kinds of information about a person
There are two kinds of thing a twin needs to know about you, and they are collected differently.
The first is context: your role, your field, who you serve, how you talk, what you have lived through. You can describe these accurately if someone asks.
The second is judgement: what you actually do when a client pushes back on price, or when a strong candidate has a weak reference. People describe this badly. Ask a consultant whether they are flexible on fees and they will say "it depends". Put a real case in front of them and they decide in seconds, with reasons.
Imora collects the two separately. Judgement comes from scenarios and goes into your reasoning graph. Context comes from a guided interview in six sections. This post is about the interview, and where it stops.
Start with judgement
Getting started does not involve the interview at all. The quick start is five real scenarios and takes about 10 minutes. You say what you would do and why. Imora distils principles from your answers, shows them with your own words beside them, and you can chat with your twin straight away.
The interview is optional deepening. It takes 30 to 40 minutes, and you can do it in one sitting or a section at a time.
The six sections
1. How You Decide
Your stated principles, priorities and trade-offs. What you protect under pressure. An adviser who values candour above comfort gives different advice from one who values the relationship first, and it helps the twin to know which you are.
2. What You Know
Your expertise and its edges. The edges matter as much as the centre. A pricing specialist who does not advise on employment law should have a twin that says so.
3. What You Do
Your role, your clients and your domain. A fractional finance director working with seed-stage companies and one working with family businesses will both "do strategy", and mean different things by it.
4. How You Think
Your habitual approach to a problem. Some people start from the numbers. Some start from the people involved. Some reach for a comparable case. This section records the habit in your own description.
5. How You Communicate
Tone, vocabulary, directness. Whether you lead with the answer or the reasoning. Whether you soften bad news or state it.
6. Experience Bank
Real stories from your career: the client you should have fired sooner, the hire you made against your instinct. These give your twin examples that actually happened.
What the interview cannot do
Everything in the interview is self-description, and self-description has a known weakness. It records what you believe about yourself, in general terms, without conditions.
"I prioritise long-term relationships" is true of nearly everyone who says it. It does not tell a twin what you do when a long-standing client is three invoices behind.
That is why the interview sets the stage and the reasoning graph does the reasoning. In the graph, evidence is what you actually decided in a specific case. Imora distils that evidence into principles with their conditions attached: "hold the price when the objection is budget; revisit scope, not rate" is something a twin can apply. We describe how that works in the reasoning graph post.
Where the two disagree, evidence wins. A correction you make to a real reply outranks everything else, including what you said about yourself in the interview.
How it comes together at answer time
When someone asks your twin a question, Imora retrieves the principles and evidence from your graph that fit the kind of decision and what is at stake. The interview context tells the model who is speaking, to whom, and in what tone. The models are Anthropic's Claude. The graph, and how it retrieves your decisions, is Imora's part.
The reply opens with the twin's read, and "why this answer" shows the principles and evidence used and how confident it could be. If your documents were used, they are cited.
If a shared twin finds no recorded view, it says so, offers an approach framed as an approach and not your position, and sends the question to your inbox.
One model of you, several twins
An Imprint is the model of you; twins are versions of it for different audiences. A client twin, a team twin, a mentoring twin. Each sets an audience, a focus and a tone, and all of them use the same interview context and the same graph. Build once, deploy many makes the case for that split.
Should you do the interview?
Do the quick start first. Chat with your twin. If its judgement is right but it sounds unlike you, or it lacks background on your field, the interview will help. If its judgement is off, more scenarios and corrections will help more.
Mirror Score rises as you add depth. It measures how much your twin has to go on. It is not an accuracy score. The product page shows all of this in order.