Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8
b8fd9afa42
Rework grilling from one-question-at-a-time to asking the whole frontier each round, with background sub-agents for fact-finding so research never blocks the round. Fold the batch-grill-me experiment into grilling and delete it. Re-sync the docs page, including how to opt back into one-at-a-time via global CLAUDE.md. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
3.6 KiB
Quickstart:
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=grilling
npx skills update grilling
What it does
grilling is the relentless interview that stress-tests a plan or design before you build it. It maps the plan as a design tree — every decision branches into the decisions that hang off it — and works that tree in rounds until you and the agent share the same understanding.
Each round asks the whole frontier: every decision whose prerequisites are already settled — the questions it can put to you now without guessing at answers it hasn't heard yet. Your answers reshape the tree, pushing the frontier outward, and the next round asks whatever that unblocks. Thirteen questions land in a handful of rounds instead of thirteen. Every question comes with the agent's own recommended answer; any fact the environment can settle it dispatches to a background sub-agent rather than asking you — and it doesn't block on that research, only the questions downstream of it wait. It won't act on the plan until you confirm the shared understanding has been reached.
Prefer one question at a time?
If the old one-at-a-time rhythm suited you better, keep it. Add a line to your global CLAUDE.md:
When grilling, ask one question at a time.
When to reach for it
Type /grilling, or the agent reaches for it automatically when a task fits — this is the underlying primitive, not a user-only entry point.
Reach for it when a plan or design still has soft spots and you want them surfaced before code is written. In practice you usually invoke it through one of its two wrappers rather than by name: for a plain grilling session use grill-me; to have the session also write ADRs and a glossary as it goes, use grill-with-docs.
The decision tree
The mental model is a design tree: every plan branches into decisions, and decisions depend on each other. The frontier is the set of decisions whose prerequisites are all settled — the only questions that can be asked without guessing. grilling asks the whole frontier at once, then recomputes it from your answers, so a round is exactly the batch of questions that don't depend on each other. A question whose answer hinges on another still open this round waits for a later round. Asking in frontier-sized rounds keeps the dependency structure intact while sparing you a question-at-a-time drip.
Pulled out on purpose
grilling is the single source of truth for the interview technique, split out as a model-invoked primitive so every skill that needs an interview can reach it instead of reinventing one. grill-me and grill-with-docs are its two user-invoked front doors, but improve-codebase-architecture and triage also lean on it to pressure-test their own decisions.
Keeping the technique in one place means you can also reach for it directly when you just want the interview — without the ADR-writing or ticket-shaping that its wrappers add on top.
Where it fits
grilling is the interview primitive under the main build chain: grill-with-docs runs it to sharpen context before to-spec writes the spec. When you're unsure which entry point fits, ask-matt routes you.