Grilling — Design Tree Interview

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.

This skill is imported from mattpocock/skills (MIT) and is model-invoked upstream.

When to use this 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.

Instructions

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>

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 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.

Examples

Apply this skill to one narrow scope first, confirm the output matches the shape described above, then widen to the full task.
When a step needs a fact from the repository or the environment, look it up instead of asking the user for it.

Best practices

Keep the upstream procedure intact; record deviations explicitly instead of silently improvising.
Stop and hand control back to the user at every decision point this skill marks as theirs.
Prefer small reversible changes, and state assumptions rather than burying them.

References

Upstream skill: mattpocock/skills skills/productivity/grilling/SKILL.md (commit 3cca18b, MIT)
Project standards: .agent-skills/skill-standardization/SKILL.md
Validator script: .agent-skills/skill-standardization/scripts/validate_skill.sh

grilling