About grilling
grilling is a design-interview skill for agents, guiding users through dependent decisions in rounds until shared understanding is confirmed. It separates decisions from facts and directs agents to investigate facts rather than ask the user.
Key features
- 01Decision tree organized by dependencies
- 02Ask all ready questions per round
- 03Include a recommended answer for each
- 04Delegate environment fact-finding
- 05Wait for confirmation before acting
Use cases
- 01Clarifying requirements before designing a feature
- 02Resolving dependent choices without guessing
- 03Checking filesystem or tool facts during planning
Install
Copy the command and run it in a terminal.
npx skills add https:/After installing, type/grillingin Claude Code to confirm it loaded.
Bundled filesagents/openai.yaml
Details
From the project READMEInterview 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.
Each question should be formatted 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. 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.