---
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.)*