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SKILL.md · Matt Pocock

Grilling

Question a plan to uncover assumptions, gaps, and decisions before implementation.

Hosted with license and attribution. This is a reviewed version, not an automatic mirror of the latest release.

When to choose it

Clarifying a product brief or proposed approach.

What to know first

Uses iterative questioning and may delegate fact-finding to sub-agents. Read its workflow before invoking it.

Use it in your project

Read the MD, then save it as SKILL.md in a named skill folder supported by your agent.

Repository installation option:

npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill grilling

Review the repository and the installer before running a command. Follow the creator’s documentation if its recommended setup differs.

Tools documented by the source: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor. Compatibility and output quality have not been independently tested.

Read the setup guide

Read the Markdown

Plain-text preview of the reviewed file. Links and instructions below are the creator’s content.

Open SKILL.md · 1,975 characters
---
name: grilling
description: Grill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea. Use when the user wants to stress-test their thinking, or uses any 'grill' trigger phrases.
---

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.

Format a round like so:

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

➡️ <your recommended answer>

---

❓ **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. The _decisions_ are the user's: put each to them and wait.

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.

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