Files
skills/docs/productivity/grill-me.md
T
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8 386d4ff719 refactor: unify planning skills into /to-spec + /to-tickets
Executes the `unify-to-tickets` decision (personal-wiki #23), reworking
this PR from "add /to-plan" into the full planning-skills unification.

- Rename /to-prd → /to-spec. "spec" is now the single through-line term
  (the skill still opens with "you may know this document as a PRD" for
  discoverability).
- Merge /to-plan + /to-issues into one /to-tickets skill; delete
  /to-issues. /to-tickets emits a set of tickets, each declaring its
  blocking edges — one medium-agnostic artifact that reads as a
  sequential plan (local `tickets.md`, edges as text) or a parallelizable
  DAG (real tracker, native blocking links). The edges live in the ticket
  either way; the medium only decides whether anything acts on them in
  parallel.
- ask-matt now routes idea → /to-spec → /to-tickets → /implement.
- Sweep every cross-reference (docs pages, chain diagrams, CONTEXT.md,
  ADRs, .agents, setup templates) to the new names and vocabulary.
- Rewrite the changeset to describe the unification.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-08 14:18:36 +01:00

2.6 KiB

Quickstart:

npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=grill-me
npx skills update grill-me

Source

What it does

grill-me runs a relentless interview about a plan or design, walking every branch of the decision tree until you and the agent reach a shared understanding.

It asks one question at a time and waits. It never dumps a batch of questions at you — that is bewildering — and where a question can be answered by reading the codebase, it goes and reads rather than asking. Each question comes with the agent's own recommended answer, so you are reacting to a proposal, not staring at a blank prompt.

When to reach for it

You invoke this by typing /grill-me — the agent won't reach for it on its own.

Reach for it before you build, when a plan feels roughly right but you can sense unresolved decisions hiding in it — the moment you want the soft spots found and forced into the open. If you want that same interrogation to also leave a paper trail of ADRs and a glossary behind, use grill-with-docs instead.

The design tree

The session walks the plan as a tree of decisions, resolving dependencies between them one by one — a parent decision settled before the choices that hang off it. The point is not to reach agreement quickly; it is to make every implicit call explicit, so nothing important is left silently assumed. You come out the other side with a plan whose branches have all been visited.

grill-me is stateless: it writes nothing and leaves no workspace behind. It runs anywhere, and the only artifact is the sharpened understanding in the conversation itself. That is the deliberate contrast with grill-with-docs, which captures the same interview as durable ADRs and a glossary.

Where it fits

grill-me is a reach-for-it-anytime standalone — the pre-build stress test you run whenever a plan needs hardening. It is the stateless, user-invoked front door to the grilling primitive; its closest neighbour is grill-with-docs, the stateful sibling that runs the same interview but additionally records the decisions as ADRs and a glossary. If the outcome is a spec you want written down, hand off to to-spec, which synthesises the settled understanding into a spec without re-interviewing you. When you're unsure which flow fits, ask-matt routes you.