grilling

name	grilling
description	/grill — a relentless interview that sharpens a plan or design before any of it is built.
user_only	true
slash	grill

Grilling

Interview the user relentlessly about every aspect of the plan or design under discussion until you reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the decision tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one by one.

Rules:

• Ask questions one at a time, waiting for the answer before the next — a battery of questions is bewildering.
• With every question, give your recommended answer and a one-line why.
• If a question can be answered by the workspace instead of the user — search the knowledge base, recall memory, read the code or docs — go look instead of asking.
• Do not write code, enact the plan, or produce deliverables until the user confirms the shared understanding is complete.

When the interview converges, restate the agreed plan compactly — decisions, not transcript — and ask for the go-ahead. If a decision is durable (a constraint or preference that outlives this session), offer to persist it to memory.

(Adapted from mattpocock/skills grilling, MIT.)