ade35dc0d8
The repeated "The load-bearing constraint:" opener on every page read as an agent tell. Strip the label across all skill pages and let the constraint stand as a plain declarative sentence; update the writing-docs template so it isn't regenerated. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2.6 KiB
Quickstart:
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=grill-me
npx skills update grill-me
What it does
grill-me runs a relentless interview about a plan or design, walking every branch of the decision tree until you and the agent reach a shared understanding.
It asks one question at a time and waits. It never dumps a batch of questions at you — that is bewildering — and where a question can be answered by reading the codebase, it goes and reads rather than asking. Each question comes with the agent's own recommended answer, so you are reacting to a proposal, not staring at a blank prompt.
When to reach for it
You invoke this by typing /grill-me — the agent won't reach for it on its own.
Reach for it before you build, when a plan feels roughly right but you can sense unresolved decisions hiding in it — the moment you want the soft spots found and forced into the open. If you want that same interrogation to also leave a paper trail of ADRs and a glossary behind, use grill-with-docs instead.
The design tree
The session walks the plan as a tree of decisions, resolving dependencies between them one by one — a parent decision settled before the choices that hang off it. The point is not to reach agreement quickly; it is to make every implicit call explicit, so nothing important is left silently assumed. You come out the other side with a plan whose branches have all been visited.
grill-me is stateless: it writes nothing and leaves no workspace behind. It runs anywhere, and the only artifact is the sharpened understanding in the conversation itself. That is the deliberate contrast with grill-with-docs, which captures the same interview as durable ADRs and a glossary.
Where it fits
grill-me is a reach-for-it-anytime standalone — the pre-build stress test you run whenever a plan needs hardening. It is the stateless, user-invoked front door to the grilling primitive; its closest neighbour is grill-with-docs, the stateful sibling that runs the same interview but additionally records the decisions as ADRs and a glossary. If the outcome is a spec you want written down, hand off to to-prd, which synthesises the settled understanding into a PRD without re-interviewing you. When you're unsure which flow fits, ask-matt routes you.