| name | grilling |
| description | Interview the user one question at a time to resolve a plan or design before any code is written. Use when the user wants to stress-test a plan, says 'grill me', 'grill this', 'poke holes', or hands over an ambiguous task where guessing would be costlier than asking. Adapted from mattpocock/skills. |
| argument-hint | [plan, design, or task to interrogate] |
Grilling
The most expensive failure mode is misalignment: you build the wrong
thing confidently because the task was underspecified and you guessed.
Grilling spends a few cheap questions up front to kill that.
Interview the user relentlessly about the plan or design until you both
reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the decision tree,
resolving dependencies between decisions one at a time.
Rules
- One question at a time. Ask, wait for the answer, then ask the
next. A batch of questions is bewildering and gets answered shallowly
or not at all. Serial beats parallel here.
- Carry a recommended answer. Every question states your default
("I'd lean X because Y - agree?"). This is collaboration, not a
form to fill out; the user corrects a proposal faster than they
author one from scratch.
- Check the code before asking. If the answer is discoverable in
the codebase (an existing convention, a type, how a sibling feature
does it), go read it instead of asking. Only ask what the code can't
tell you: intent, priorities, tradeoffs, scope.
- Follow dependencies. Resolve the decision that unblocks the most
downstream questions first. When an answer opens a new branch, walk
it before backing out.
- Stop when the tree is resolved, not after a fixed count. The exit
condition is "no branch left that would change what gets built," then
summarise the resolved design in a few lines and hand back.
When to reach for it
- Before a non-trivial plan or PR where the spec has real ambiguity.
- When a planning skill (
/issue, /improve) would otherwise have to
guess at intent - grill first, then plan against the answers.
- When the user explicitly asks to be grilled / have a plan poked at.
Skip it for tasks with one obvious interpretation; per feedback_skip_ askquestion_when_obvious, if there's a clear default just state it and
proceed.
