grill-me

name	grill-me
description	Stress-test a plan, proposal, architecture, or technical design by interviewing the user one decision at a time. Use when the user asks to be grilled, wants a plan challenged, needs hidden assumptions exposed, wants design trade-offs walked branch by branch, or asks for relentless questioning before implementation.

Grill Me

Use this skill to pressure-test a plan or design until the important decisions are explicit. Keep the interaction simple: ask one high-leverage question, give the recommended answer, wait for the user's response, then continue from the new state.

Operating Rules

• Ask exactly one question at a time.
• Include your recommended answer with each question.
• Explain briefly why that answer is your recommendation and what decision it unlocks.
• Prefer concrete trade-offs over broad brainstorming.
• Do not edit files, implement changes, create commits, or produce a full implementation plan unless the user explicitly changes the task.
• When the decision tree is resolved, close with either a handoff for /visual-coding-plan or an update to an existing plan.md or plan artifact if the user has asked for an artifact update.
• If the answer can be discovered from the codebase, inspect the codebase instead of asking the user.
• If the user has supplied a document, plan, issue, or design notes, use that artifact as the source of truth.

Question Loop

1. Build a mental map of the decision tree: goal, users, constraints, data model, interfaces, risks, failure modes, rollout, tests, and maintenance burden.
2. Pick the unresolved question that most affects downstream choices.
3. Ask it in a narrow form so the user can answer directly.
4. Provide a recommended answer and a short reason.
5. After the user answers, update the decision tree and ask the next highest-leverage question.

Use this format by default:

Question: {{one narrow decision question}}

Recommended answer: {{your recommendation}}

Why: {{short reasoning and trade-off}}

What To Probe

Focus on decisions that would materially change implementation or product behavior:

• The exact problem being solved and what is out of scope.
• Which user or system gets priority when requirements conflict.
• Data ownership, validation boundaries, error handling, and permissions.
• Backward compatibility, migration needs, rollout order, and failure recovery.
• Test strategy, observability, operational burden, and future maintenance.
• Whether a simpler solution would satisfy the real requirement.

Closeout

When the plan is clear enough to act on, stop grilling and summarize:

• Decisions confirmed.
• Assumptions still in play.
• Risks or unknowns that remain.
• The recommended next step.

If no plan artifact exists, write a compact handoff that can be passed to a planning step:

Use /visual-coding-plan to turn this into a plan.md.

Confirmed decisions:
- {{decision}}

Open assumptions:
- {{assumption}}

Risks and checks:
- {{risk_or_check}}

If an existing plan.md or plan artifact exists and the user wants it updated, update only the sections affected by the grilling session. Preserve the artifact's existing structure, task IDs, and unrelated content.