grilling

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.

Prefer presenting each round's questions through the AskUserQuestion tool, giving every question 2-4 concrete options rather than free-form prose — make your recommended answer the first option and mark it "(Recommended)" so the steer is visible at a glance. The tool takes up to 4 questions per call, so split a larger round across consecutive calls. When a question genuinely can't be framed as options, fall back to prose formatted like so:

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

➡️ <your recommended answer>

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❓ **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. When the fact itself is expensive to get and the question it feeds has wide downstream fan-out, put the deferral to the user as an option with its cost named, rather than silently stalling the round on it. The decisions are the user's: put each to them and wait.

Grilling decides which questions enter a round — the frontier. Building each one belongs to framing-decisions: call the Skill tool with "framing-decisions" and run its protocol on every question before the round goes out. The division is scheduling versus construction. Grilling owns which questions get asked and when; framing-decisions owns how each question's option set is built — answer it as the domain expert first, audit that the menu can actually hold that answer, name the premise the options rest on, put your recommendation first. Its rule that separate decisions get separate calls governs unstructured conversation, where nothing orders the decisions against each other; a frontier is separate-but-related by construction — every prerequisite decision settled, anything waiting on a fact still being gathered held to a later round — so a round may share a call.

One exception, and it is the reason the exception exists: a question that could reframe its neighbours leaves the round and goes alone, first. Ontological questions qualify — what something is, its unit, medium, atom, or state — as do premise-fragile ones and any question with wide downstream fan-out. Ask it, wait, recompute the frontier against the answer. Batching one of these forfeits the rest of the round: when the user rejects the frame rather than the options, every question sent alongside it was asked against a frame that no longer exists.

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.