Grill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea. Use when the user wants to stress-test their thinking, uses any 'grill' trigger phrases, or when a direction owner's rule calls for convergence rounds.
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---
name: grilling
description: Grill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea. Use when the user wants to stress-test their thinking, uses any 'grill' trigger phrases, or when a direction owner's rule calls for convergence rounds.
---
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.
When the user's global rules set a format or route for messages that need the user's reply, follow them. Otherwise, format each question like so:
```
❓ **Q1** - **<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. Obtain an environmental fact directly when a focused read or observation is sufficient. Delegate bounded investigation when independent work, specialist observation, or context isolation adds enough value to cover its handoff and integration cost; use the host workflow's production-topology rule when one applies. Do not ask the user for a fact you can obtain. A running investigation is an unsettled prerequisite: only its dependent questions wait, while independent work can continue. User-owned decisions still return to the user.
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.
