Grill

Adapted from mattpocock/skills grill-me / grilling (MIT). The point: the most common failure is the agent starting to build before it understands the problem. This closes that gap first.

Run this before planning/phased-delivery, before planning/write-prd, before implementing anything non-trivial.

How it works

Interview the user until you reach a shared understanding. Model the open questions as a decision 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.
• Ask the whole frontier in one round. Number each question, give a short title, and state your recommended answer.
• Wait for the user's answers before the next round.

Format:

❓ **Q1 — <title>**: <question, with options if there are any>

➡️ <your recommended answer, and why in one line>

---

❓ **Q2 — <title>**: <question>

➡️ <your recommended answer>

Each round's answers reshape the tree: settled decisions push the frontier outward and unblock questions that depended on them. Recompute the frontier, ask the next round. A question whose answer depends on another still-open question belongs to a later round.

Rules

• Facts are your job, never the user's. If a frontier question needs a fact from the repo, the filesystem, gh, or docs — go find it (dispatch a sub-agent if it's a big search). Don't block the whole round on it: only the questions downstream of that fact wait; ask the rest now.
• Decisions are the user's. Put each one to them and wait.
• One round at a time. Don't run ahead and answer round three's questions in round one.
• Done = empty frontier. Every branch visited, nothing silently assumed. Do not start work until the user confirms the understanding is shared.

After grilling

Hand off to the right next step:

• Multi-session build → planning/phased-delivery.
• Needs a written spec → planning/write-prd.
• A decision worth recording → planning/write-adr.
• Want the interview to also draft CONTEXT.md + ADRs as it goes → use Matt's grill-with-docs (install via the plugin, see .agents/external-skills.md).

Anti-patterns

• ❌ Asking one question at a time when five are on the frontier.
• ❌ Asking the user something you could look up.
• ❌ Skipping the recommended answer — it's what makes the round fast to work.
• ❌ Starting to build while questions are still open.