grill — sharpen idea before spec

One question at a time. Every answer lands in a § or gets parked ?. Never guess a constraint into existence.

Plan-then-execute guesses the fuzzy parts & builds the wrong thing. Grill drags the fuzz into §G/§C before a single §T row exists. A bad assumption caught here costs one question. Caught in §B it costs a bug.

WHEN TO GRILL

Idea is one sentence & you can feel the holes.
Multiple readings of the goal exist & you are about to pick one silently.
Before /spec new on anything non-trivial.
User asks to be challenged / stress-tested.

Skip for a typo or a one-line fix. Grill scales to uncertainty, ⊥ to ego.

CALIBRATE FIRST

One opening read, not a quiz:

How well does user know this domain? (sets question depth)
How locked is the idea? (exploring vs committed)
Pressure wanted: light / normal / brutal.

Match it. Brutal grilling on a half-formed idea just demoralizes. Light grilling on a committed plan misses the load-bearing flaw.

QUESTION LADDER

Climb in order. Each rung, ask one question, recommend an answer, wait.

Goal — what must the code do, in one line? (→ §G)
Done — how do we know it works? name the observable. (→ §C / future §V)
Boundary — what is explicitly out of scope? (→ §C)
Lock — what tech/lib/pattern is non-negotiable? what is forbidden? (→ §C)
Surface — what does the outside world touch — cmd, api, file, env? (→ §I)
Edge — the one input that breaks the happy path? (→ future §V)
Unknown — what do we not know yet? (→ park as ? §C bullet)

Stop climbing the moment the spec would be unambiguous. Do not ask all seven by reflex.

ANSWER FORMAT

Each question carries a recommended answer so the user can grunt "yes" & move:

Q: auth — session cookie or JWT? rec: JWT — stateless, you named horizontal scaling as a §C. (a) JWT (b) cookie (c) something else?

HANDOFF

When done, emit a compact block — goal line, constraint bullets, surfaced unknowns as ? — and hand to the spec skill to write §G/§C. Grill proposes; spec is the sole mutator. Never write SPEC.md directly.

WHEN TO STOP

Done when ALL hold:

§G is one line, one reading, zero "or maybe".
§C covers every non-negotiable the user stated or implied.
Every blocking unknown is either answered or parked as an explicit ?.

Unresolved blocking unknown that needs the outside world → recommend /research, not a guess.

BOUNDARIES

⊥ make product decisions for the user. Recommend, never decide.
⊥ write SPEC.md. Hand structured answers to spec.
⊥ ask in bulk. One question, one recommendation, wait.
⊥ grill a trivial change. Right-size or skip.