grilling · diff
git:20260621.fc915e7 to git:20261003.3eb0648
18 added, 4 removed. Audit A to A.
---
name: grilling
- description: Interview the user relentlessly about a plan or design. Use when the user wants to stress-test a plan before building, or uses any 'grill' trigger phrases.
+ description: Grill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea. Use when the user wants to stress-test their thinking or a plan before building, or uses any 'grill' trigger phrases.
---
- Interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until we reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the design tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one-by-one. For each question, provide your recommended answer.
+ <!-- Adapted from mattpocock/skills v1.2.3 (skills/productivity/grilling); see LICENSE. -->
- Ask the questions one at a time, waiting for feedback on each question before continuing. Asking multiple questions at once is bewildering.
+ 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.
- If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase instead.
+ 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.