Matt Pocock
a3065f1b7b
The old page explained the mechanism and stopped. It answered none of the questions people actually ask: which grilling skill to reach for, how many questions is normal, what to do with a question talking can't settle, whether to clear context before to-spec. Keep the mechanism short and spend the page on judgement instead: three-way sibling routing keyed on what you have in front of you; a section naming passivity as the main failure mode; grillable vs ungrillable as the move for questions that need a prototype; an "It's working if" list; and a "Common questions" section answering the six highest-volume ones. Say plainly to leave plan mode off. Sourced from user questions across X, Discord and YouTube.
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What it does
grill-me interviews you about a plan until every decision inside it has been made on purpose rather than by default. It asks in rounds: each round is the whole frontier — every question whose prerequisites you have already settled — so you are never asked something that hinges on an answer it hasn't heard yet.
It is stateless. It writes no files and leaves no workspace behind. The only thing it produces is a sharper plan in your own head.
When to reach for it
You invoke this by typing /grill-me — the agent won't reach for it on its own. Start it in a fresh conversation, not on top of a plan you already had an agent write.
Reach for it when a plan feels roughly right and you suspect it isn't. Which of the three grilling skills you want depends on what is in front of you:
- No codebase yet —
grill-me. There is nothing to align against, so there is nothing worth recording. - A codebase — grill-with-docs. The same interview, but stateful: it keeps what it learns in
CONTEXT.mdand ADRs. - Too big for one session — wayfinder. It charts the effort as a map and runs grilling sessions inside it.
Leave plan mode off. Plan mode primes the agent to rush toward producing a plan, which is the opposite of staying in inquiry.
It's a conversation, not an interview
The skill asks the questions, but you own the scope. That is the part people miss, and it separates a session that sharpens a plan from one that produces confident nonsense.
The failure mode is passivity — answering "agreed, agreed, agreed" for forty questions and coming out with a plan the agent wrote and you nodded at. It feels productive because it was long. Nothing was actually decided, and the result carries a certainty it hasn't earned.
Being active means steering. Push back on a question pitched beneath the fidelity you need. Say when the scope is drifting. Answer "I don't know" and mean it. This skill is built to aid an engineer, not to replace one: what comes out tracks the quality of your answers, not the number of questions asked.
The opposite error is real but rarer — staying in the interview so long you never reach code.
Grillable and ungrillable
Some questions can be answered by talking. Others can't, and no amount of grilling will get you there.
"One long form or three pages?" and "how should this interaction feel?" are ungrillable — they need something to react to. When you hit one, stop grilling. Build the throwaway version with prototype, look at it, then come back and answer in one line.
Talking your way through an ungrillable question is where sessions balloon. The agent keeps rephrasing, you keep guessing, and the scope grows to fill the uncertainty.
It's working if
- You disagree with something. A session with no pushback from you is a session you didn't need.
- Questions arrive in a few rounds rather than one long drip, and later rounds clearly build on what you said earlier.
- You end up somewhere you didn't expect, because a question surfaced a decision you had been making implicitly.
- At the end you could defend each choice to someone who wasn't there.
Common questions
How many questions should I expect, and how do I know when it ends? Count rounds, not questions. Forty-six questions across four rounds is an ordinary session. It ends when the frontier is empty — every branch visited, nothing left silently assumed.
It asked me two hundred questions. What went wrong? Usually the scope was too large. Ask the agent to break the work into smaller pieces first, then grill each one. Very long sessions also drift into the dumb zone, where the context window is full enough that the questions get worse.
Can I go back to one question at a time?
Yes. Add this to your global CLAUDE.md:
When grilling, ask one question at a time.
What if I genuinely don't know the answer? Say so. "I don't know" is a real answer, and a question you can't answer is usually a sign to prototype rather than to guess.
Do I start a fresh session before writing the spec? No. The value of the session is the context you just built. Hand the same conversation straight to to-spec.
Does the model matter? More than for most skills. Grilling leans on the model's own sense of how systems break, so give it your best one. Implementation mostly follows context and tolerates a cheaper model.
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 against a codebase and records the decisions as ADRs and a glossary. When the plan is settled, hand the conversation to to-spec, which writes it up without re-interviewing you. When you're unsure which flow fits, ask-matt routes you.