| name | grilling |
| description | Grill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea. Use when the user wants to stress-test their thinking, says "grill me" or "grill with docs", or uses another grill trigger phrase. |
Interview the user relentlessly until you reach a shared understanding. Map this as a design tree: every decision branches into the decisions that hang off it.
Modes
- Standard: Use the interview workflow below.
- With docs: When the user asks to "grill with docs", also load
domain-modeling. Maintain its glossary during the interview and offer an ADR only when its reversal, surprise, and trade-off conditions are all true. The interview workflow still controls question order and completion.
Work the tree in rounds. The frontier is every decision whose prerequisites are already settled — the questions you can ask now without guessing at answers you haven't heard yet. Ask the whole frontier in one round: number each question and give your recommended answer. Then wait for the user's answers before the next round.
Each question should be formatted like so:
❓ **Q1** - **<question title>**: <question body, might be multiple paragraphs, including multiple choices>
➡️ <your recommended answer>
Each round the user answers reshapes the tree — settled decisions push the frontier outward and unblock questions that depended on them. Recompute the frontier and ask the next round. A question whose answer depends on another question still open in this round belongs to a later round, not this one.
Finding facts is your job, never the user's. When a frontier question needs a fact from the environment (filesystem, tools, etc.), dispatch a sub-agent to find it — don't ask the user for anything you could look up yourself. Don't block on it: a running exploration is an unsettled prerequisite, so only the questions downstream of it wait for the sub-agent to report — ask the rest of the frontier now. The decisions are the user's — put each to them and wait.
The session is done when the frontier is empty: every branch of the design tree visited, nothing left silently assumed. Do not act on it until the user confirms you have reached a shared understanding.
