Grill Me

Purpose

Interview the user relentlessly about every aspect of a plan or design until both sides reach a shared understanding. Walk each branch of the decision tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one at a time. Works for any subject — a marketing plan, a doc outline, a product decision, a code change.

Workflow

1. Interview Relentlessly Toward Shared Understanding

   • Switch on when the user says a trigger phrase or invokes /grill-me
   • Triggers: "grill me", "interview me", /grill-me
   • Confirm the subject under interview (the plan or design); read it if it lives in a file or recent message
   • Continue questioning until both sides share the same mental model of every aspect — do not stop early
   • Upstream: "Interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until we reach a shared understanding."

2. Walk Each Branch of the Decision Tree

   • Treat the plan as a tree of decisions; resolve dependencies between decisions one by one
   • Stay on the current branch until its dependent decisions are resolved before moving to the next
   • Upstream: "Walk down each branch of the design tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one-by-one."

3. One Question at a Time, With a Recommended Answer

   • Exactly one question per turn — never batch
   • Pair each question with your recommended answer so the user can react quickly
   • Wait for the user's reply before moving on
   • Upstream: "Ask the questions one at a time." / "For each question, provide your recommended answer."

4. Resolve from Source When the Question Allows

   • IF: the question can be answered by exploring the codebase (or whatever source-of-truth artifact the subject lives in)
   • THEN: explore the source instead of asking the user, then report the finding
   • Upstream: "If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase instead."

Works well with

Optional collaborators — grill-me runs standalone and these degrade gracefully if absent.

• grill-with-docs — the doc-aware variant: use it instead when the plan should be stress-tested against CONTEXT.md and docs/adr/, sharpening terms and recording ADRs as you go.
• living-plan — grill before create-plan to resolve the decision tree, or grill a plan-first strawman's Questionables and feed resolutions back via update-plan.
• diagnose — when a bug report is ambiguous, grill first to nail the actual failure mode before reaching for the diagnosis loop.
• tdd — align on scope and behaviors here before building test-first.