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.
Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.
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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, or uses any 'grill' trigger phrases.
license: MIT
---
<!--
Source: https://github.com/mattpocock/skills
Pinned commit: c55ee46073ed923f86ce59a5eb3b6d895095d1b7
Upstream path: skills/productivity/grilling/
License: MIT (c) 2026 Matt Pocock -- full text in LICENSE next to this file
Forge vendor note: frontmatter license: MIT key and this provenance block added; agents/openai.yaml (Codex UI metadata, no function in Claude Code) not shipped; everything else verbatim.
Reviewed for prompt-injection patterns, hidden/zero-width/bidi/control unicode, network use and deletes by build-boss, 2026-09-24 -- clean; every upstream file sha256-verified against the pinned-commit manifest before copying.
-->
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.
