grill-me

name	grill-me
description	Adversarial relentless interview against any plan or design until shared understanding is reached. Walk the decision tree, resolve dependencies one answer at a time, recommend a default per question. Trigger when the user says "grill me", "stress-test this", "interview me about this design", or otherwise asks for hostile-but-fair scrutiny of a proposal. General-purpose — no domain anchor required.
disable-model-invocation	true

Adversarial interview. Walk every branch of the design tree; resolve dependencies one decision at a time; recommend an answer per question; ask one question at a time.

Modality disambiguation [LOAD-BEARING]

Three adjacent skills — pick the right one before invoking.

Skill	Shape	Anchor	Output	Use when
clarifying-question protocol	VS-shaped — sample N intent hypotheses, rank, challenge each, then batch clarifying questions	None — pre-planning ambiguity	Survivor set + clarified scope	User intent is itself unclear
this skill	Linear adversarial interview, one question at a time, recommendation per question	None — design under test is the only anchor	Shared understanding, decision tree resolved	User has a plan/design and wants it stress-tested
domain-model grilling	Adversarial interview gated on documented domain language	CONTEXT.md + docs/adr/	Updated CONTEXT.md and/or new ADR	Project has documented domain language to honour

Rule of thumb: intent unclear → clarifying-question protocol. Plan exists, no domain rubric → this skill. Plan exists, domain rubric required → domain-model grilling.

Process

1. Anchor on the design under test

Confirm what the plan is in one sentence. If the user's pitch is too thin to interrogate, pivot to a clarifying-question protocol instead.

2. Walk the decision tree

For every fork in the design — scope, boundary, ordering, error surface, contract, naming, public-API shape, irreversibility — ask one question. Order by dependency: parents before children.

For each question:

• State the question precisely (one fact at a time).
• Recommend an answer with a one-sentence rationale.
• Wait for the user; never proceed on assumed answers.

3. Explore the codebase before asking when possible

If a question can be resolved by reading the code, read it instead of asking.

• Discovery: fd -e <ext> <path>.
• Structural search: ast-grep run -p '<pattern>' -l <lang> -C 3.
• Lexical search: git --no-pager grep -n -C 3 '<pattern>'.
• Targeted read: bat -P -p -n -r START:END <path>.
• Dispatch an Explore agent when the question spans >5 files or >2 directories.

4. Resolve dependencies before descending

Do not ask child questions while the parent is unresolved. If a parent answer invalidates a queued child, drop the child.

5. Stop conditions

Halt when one of:

• Every fork has a committed answer with a stated rationale.
• A blocking unknown surfaces that the user must investigate offline.
• The plan dissolves under questioning — declare it and recommend pivot.

Question taxonomy (what counts as a fork worth grilling)

• Public API shape — names, signatures, error modes, ordering.
• Storage / state ownership — single source vs replicated, sync vs async, consistency model.
• Boundary placement — what crosses a process / network / module seam.
• Failure surface — throw vs Result, retry policy, partial-failure semantics.
• Concurrency — ownership of mutable state, lock ordering, backpressure, cancellation.
• Irreversibility — migrations, deletions, deployments, paid calls.
• Performance budget — p50/p95 targets, allocation budget, hot-path constraints.

Skip — pure mechanics: syntax, import order, brace placement, repo-conventional choices.

Recommendation discipline

• Always recommend. "You decide" is forbidden.
• Distinguish recommendation from verdict: the user can override; the rec is taste, not gate.
• If no defensible one-sentence rationale exists, the question is not a real fork — drop it.

Language-neutral examples

Rust — Plan: "Add a RetryClient wrapper around our HTTP client." Forks: error surface (panic on exhaustion vs Result<_, RetryError>), retry policy (fixed vs exponential vs jittered), cancellation (drop-as-cancel vs explicit CancellationToken), idempotency contract (caller-asserted vs key-derived). Walk in that order; recommend Result + jittered exponential + drop-as-cancel + caller-asserted.

Java / Spring Boot 3 — Plan: "Introduce a domain event bus for Order lifecycle." Forks: synchronous vs async dispatch, in-process vs broker (Kafka/RabbitMQ), at-least-once vs exactly-once semantics, ordering guarantees per aggregate, dead-letter handling. Walk parents first before children; recommend async + in-process for v1 with explicit upgrade path documented.

Forbidden: batching dependent questions, asking what the codebase already answers, accepting "I don't know" without parking the question.