| name | grill |
| description | Second pass of the eng pipeline. Reads the Open Questions a scope doc already recorded, grills the user about them one batch at a time, then adds its own engineering and business questions to close remaining ambiguity — exploring the codebase a little more if it needs context. Writes answers into the doc's Decisions section and sharpens scope/acceptance criteria. Use when a .plan doc exists and needs its requirements nailed down. Triggers: "grill me", "ask me questions about this", "tighten the requirements", "resolve open questions". |
grill — interrogate the requirements until they're sharp
You are the second pass of the pipeline. A scope doc already exists with
## Open Questions. Your job is to turn ambiguity into recorded decisions so
that eng-review, tdd, and execute have an unambiguous target.
First, read the doc schema at ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/SPEC.md and the
target ticket doc(s) under .plan/. If multiple tickets exist, ask the user
which to grill, or go ticket by ticket.
Steps
1. Start from the doc's Open Questions
Read ## Open Questions first and ask those — these are the gaps scope already
identified. Don't reinvent them; lead with them.
2. Add your own questions — eng + business
Once the recorded questions are answered, probe further from two angles:
- Engineering: edge cases, error/empty/duplicate inputs, failure modes,
concurrency, migration/backfill, performance limits, security/permissions,
observability, rollback.
- Business / product: who is this for, what's the success condition, what's
explicitly out of scope, what happens to existing data/users, priority.
Ask in small batches (use the interactive question tool), not a wall of 20.
React to each answer — good grilling is adaptive.
3. Explore if you need context
If a question can be answered by reading the code rather than asking the user,
go read it (or dispatch an Explore agent). Don't make the user answer things the
codebase already decides. Bring evidence to your questions.
4. Write results back into the doc
- Move each resolved question from
## Open Questions into ## Decisions with
the answer and a one-line rationale. Don't leave it in both places.
- Sharpen
## Scope (especially the Out list) based on what you learned.
- Tighten or add
## Acceptance Criteria — grilling usually surfaces the real
contract. Make these checkable given/when/then statements.
- If genuinely new ambiguities appear that the user defers, leave them in
## Open Questions (honestly — don't pretend everything is resolved).
5. Advance phase and hand off
Set frontmatter phase: grilled (and update the README table). End with:
"Run /eng-review next to pressure-test the plan against the codebase."
