Grilling

Grilling — Design Tree Interview

Grill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea. Use when the user wants to stress-test their thinking, or uses any 'grill' trigger phrases.

This skill is imported from mattpocock/skills (MIT) and is model-invoked upstream.

When to use this skill

• Grill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea.
• Use when the user wants to stress-test their thinking, or uses any 'grill' trigger phrases.

Instructions

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.

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.

Format a round like so:

❓ **Q1** - **<question title>**: <question body, might be multiple paragraphs, including multiple choices>

➡️ <your recommended answer>

---

❓ **Q2** - **<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.

Examples

• Apply this skill to one narrow scope first, confirm the output matches the shape described above, then widen to the full task.
• When a step needs a fact from the repository or the environment, look it up instead of asking the user for it.

Best practices

• Keep the upstream procedure intact; record deviations explicitly instead of silently improvising.
• Stop and hand control back to the user at every decision point this skill marks as theirs.
• Prefer small reversible changes, and state assumptions rather than burying them.

References

• Upstream skill: mattpocock/skills skills/productivity/grilling/SKILL.md (commit 3cca18b, MIT)
• Project standards: .agent-skills/skill-standardization/SKILL.md
• Validator script: .agent-skills/skill-standardization/scripts/validate_skill.sh