Every plan looks solid on paper. It’s only when you start building that the hidden assumptions surface - the ambiguous edge case, the dependency you didn’t know existed, the decision you deferred that now blocks everything.
mattpocock/skills is a collection of engineering productivity skills for AI coding agents. The grill-me skill is designed to surface those holes before you write code.
What it is
grill-me runs a “relentless interview” on your plan or design. You describe what you want to build, and the agent walks down every branch of your decision tree, one question at a time.
It’s a thin wrapper that delegates to the grilling skill, whose prompt instructs the agent to:
Interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until we reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the design tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one-by-one. For each question, provide your recommended answer.
The rules
Three constraints keep the grilling productive:
One question at a time. Asking multiple questions at once is bewildering. The agent asks one, waits for your answer, then proceeds. This forces real consideration of each tradeoff instead of skimming past a list.
Look up facts, don’t ask. If the answer lives in the codebase, the agent finds it rather than asking you. What middleware exists, what patterns are already established, what config values are in use - the agent reads the code so you don’t have to explain context it can discover.
Decisions are yours. The agent provides a recommended answer for each question, but you make the call. You stay in control of the design.
Why one question at a time
A human reviewer can list ten concerns in a single message. An LLM can vomit up thirty questions in one prompt. Neither is useful with the normal impulse being to answer superficially and move on.
grilling is deliberately capped at one question. The result is a gradually enriched context window.
The family: grill-with-docs
If you want artifacts alongside the interrogation, there’s grill-with-docs. It runs the same session but also writes ADRs capturing each decision and a glossary of domain terms that emerged during the conversation.
Use grill-me for a quick sanity check. Use grill-with-docs when you need a written record - handoff, onboarding, or audit trail.
When to use it
- Architecture decisions - The agent forces you to articulate tradeoffs before choosing.
- API design - Every endpoint, status code, and auth boundary gets examined.
- Refactoring plans - “What depends on this?” is answered by the codebase; “what’s the migration strategy?” is answered by you.
- Cross-team handoffs - Run a grilling session, then share the output as a spec.
The key insight: you want to make mistakes when they’re cheap. A wrong turn in a conversation costs five minutes. A wrong turn in code costs a rewrite.
The result
But once you have sufficiently grilled the question and have your enriched context window, what then? You can turn it into a specification by using the to-spec skills from the same skills repository.
This transforms the long conversation into an actionable set of tasks that you - or an agent - can work on, safe in the knowledge you have done your best to identify edge cases.
Try it
Load grill-me into any agent platform that supports skill loading (OpenCode, Claude Code, etc.) and say “grill me on [your plan]”. The agent will start interviewing you.
