f5ed5657bd
Adds a docs page for every promoted skill that lacked one, following .agents/writing-docs.md and using docs/engineering/to-prd.md as the worked exemplar. Covers all of engineering/ (bar to-prd, already done), productivity/, and misc/. Each page states its load-bearing constraint, its invocation mode and trigger boundary, surfaces the skill's leading word, and routes back to ask-matt so the set forms a connected router with no dead ends. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2.2 KiB
Quickstart:
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=grilling
npx skills update grilling
What it does
grilling is the relentless interview that stress-tests a plan or design before you build it. It walks down the design tree branch by branch, resolving the dependencies between decisions one at a time until you and the agent share the same understanding.
The load-bearing constraint: it asks one question at a time and waits for your answer before the next — never a bulk list, which is bewildering. Each question comes with the agent's own recommended answer, and any question the codebase can settle it explores instead of asking you.
When to reach for it
Type /grilling, or the agent reaches for it automatically when a task fits — this is the underlying primitive, not a user-only entry point.
Reach for it when a plan or design still has soft spots and you want them surfaced before code is written. In practice you usually invoke it through one of its two wrappers rather than by name: for a plain grilling session use grill-me; to have the session also write ADRs and a glossary as it goes, use grill-with-docs.
The design tree
The mental model is a design tree: every plan branches into decisions, and decisions depend on each other. grilling descends that tree one node at a time, so an early answer can reshape which questions come next. That is why the questions arrive singly and in dependency order — a firehose of parallel questions loses the structure that makes the interview converge on a shared understanding.
Where it fits
grilling is a primitive — the interview engine that grill-me and grill-with-docs both run. Those two are the user-invoked front doors; grilling is the shared technique underneath, and it also opens the main build chain, sharpening context before to-prd writes the spec. When you're unsure which entry point fits, ask-matt routes you.