grilling skill
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.
Is the grilling skill safe?
Clean: nothing in its files matched our rules. We read 2 files in the folder on 2026-11-01.
No findings.
Install the grilling skill
A skill is a folder. Copy it into your agent's skills folder and the agent loads it when the task matches its description.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mattpocock/skills.git /tmp/skills mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills cp -r /tmp/skills/skills/productivity/grilling ~/.claude/skills/grilling
In the Claude apps, zip the folder and upload it from the Skills settings. The folder on GitHub
The instructions your agent would load
SKILL.md as published, without the frontmatter. Read it on GitHub
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>Word each question so "yes" accepts 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 with a fresh context window 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.
More skills from mattpocock/skills
- Aask-mattAsk which skill or flow fits your situation. A router over the skills in this repo.
- Achief-of-staffPursue a long-running goal in a single session by co-ordinating subagents.
- Aclaude-handoffHand the current conversation off to a fresh background agent that picks up the work immediately.
- Acode-reviewReview the changes since a fixed point (commit, branch, tag, or merge-base) along two axes: Standards (does the code follow this repo's documented coding standards?) and Spec (does the code match what the originating issue/spec asked for?). Runs both reviews in parallel sub-agents and reports them side by side. Use when the user wants to review a branch, a PR, work-in-progress changes, or asks to \"review since X\".
- Acodebase-designShared vocabulary for designing deep modules. Use when the user wants to design or improve a module's interface, find deepening opportunities, decide where a seam goes, make code more testable or AI-navigable, or when another skill needs the deep-module vocabulary.
- Adiagnosing-bugsDiagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions. Use when the user says "diagnose"/"debug this", or reports something broken/throwing/failing/slow.
- Adomain-modelingBuild and sharpen a project's domain model. Use when discussing codebase terminology, writing or editing a GLOSSARY.md, or recording or editing an ADR.
- Agit-guardrails-claude-codeSet up Claude Code hooks to block dangerous git commands (push, reset --hard, clean, branch -D, etc.) before they execute. Use when user wants to prevent destructive git operations, add git safety hooks, or block git push/reset in Claude Code.
- Agrill-meA relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design.
- Agrill-with-docsA relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design, which also creates docs (ADR's and glossary) as we go.
- AhandoffCompact the current conversation into a handoff document for another agent to pick up.
- AimplementImplement a piece of work based on a spec or set of tickets.