# Grill Me

> Relentless one-question-at-a-time interview to stress-test a plan, design, decision, or setup until shared understanding is reached. Use when the user says "grill me", wants a plan poked at, pressure-tested, red-teamed, or holes found before building, or wants hard questions asked about something they are about to commit to. The aligned conversation is the output: build or change nothing until understanding is confirmed.

- Skill: `campbellsmurphy/grill-me` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add campbellsmurphy/grill-me`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/campbellsmurphy/grill-me/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: campbellsmurphy (https://skillmd.com/u/campbellsmurphy)
- Updated: 2026-09-22
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/campbellsmurphy/grill-me

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# Grill me

Matt Pocock's pattern (github.com/mattpocock/skills, MIT), adapted.

Interview the user relentlessly about every aspect of the plan until you reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the design tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one by one: most upstream, highest-stakes decision first; a branch is not done until the decisions hanging off it are resolved.

Rules:

- Ask **one question at a time** and wait for the answer before the next. Asking multiple questions at once is bewildering.
- For each question, **state your recommended answer** and the reason, so "yes" is a sufficient reply.
- If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, the notes, or memory, **explore instead of asking**. Only ask what genuinely requires the user's judgment.
- No softballs. At each branch, probe failure modes, maintenance burden, contradictions between stated goals, what happens when nobody is watching the thing, and what "done" means.
- Push back when an answer conflicts with something established: a recorded fact, a CLAUDE.md principle, an earlier answer in the same session. Silent agreement is worse than friction.
- Answers may arrive by dictation. Read speech-like phrasing charitably and confirm when genuinely ambiguous.
- Do not enact the plan until the user confirms shared understanding has been reached.

When shared understanding is reached: recap the decisions in a terse list (decision plus one-line why), note anything explicitly deferred, and offer to persist the outcome (a note wherever the user keeps project records, or nowhere).