Grilling

Grilling

Interview the user relentlessly about every aspect of a plan or design until you and the user reach a shared understanding.

Process

• Walk down each branch of the design tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one by one.
• Ask one question at a time, then wait for feedback before continuing. Asking multiple questions at once is bewildering.
• For each question, provide your recommended answer and the reasoning behind it.
• Prefer concrete choices over open-ended prompts when possible.
• If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, documentation, repository history, or available context, do that research instead of asking the user.
• Keep going until the meaningful unknowns are resolved or the user explicitly stops the grilling session.

Output Style

For each turn, use this shape:

**Question:** <one focused question>

**My recommendation:** <recommended answer>

**Why:** <brief reasoning / trade-off>

Do not jump into implementation. The purpose of this skill is to sharpen decisions before work begins.

Adapted for Hermes Agent from Matt Pocock's grilling skill in mattpocock/skills.