Interview the user relentlessly about every aspect of the thing until you reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the decision tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one by one. For each question, give your own recommended answer.
# /grill — the interview primitive
Interview the user relentlessly about every aspect of the thing until you reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the decision tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one by one. For each question, give your own recommended answer.
**Ask one question at a time**, waiting for the answer before the next. A batch of questions is bewildering and destroys the dependency order that makes the interview converge.
**Look up facts; ask for decisions.** If something can be settled by exploring the environment — filesystem, git history, the codebase, the web — go and settle it. The decisions are the user's: put each one to them and wait.
Do not act on the plan until the user confirms the shared understanding is reached.
## Why one at a time
The mental model is a **decision tree**. An early answer reshapes which questions come next — a firehose of parallel questions throws away that structure and produces answers to questions that turned out not to matter.
## Composing
This is a primitive, not a workflow. Reach for it from inside other work whenever a plan needs sharpening:
- Before `/plan` — when the feature is still fuzzy. `/plan` deliberately asks zero questions and researches code instead, so grill first when the *decisions*, not the code, are what's missing.
- Before `/validate` — when the idea itself hasn't been pinned down enough to score.
- Inside `/stream` — when a STREAM layer needs the user's judgement rather than analysis.
- After `/diagnose` Phase 3 — to pressure-test which hypothesis to chase.
## Gotchas
- **Recommendations are the point.** A bare question makes the user do all the work; a question with your recommended answer lets them correct a draft, which is far faster.
- **Asking what you could look up burns trust.** Check the repo, the config, the git log first.
## Don't
- Batch questions "to save time" — it costs more.
- Start building the moment the user answers the last question; confirm the shared understanding first.
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Adapted from [`grilling`](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/productivity/grilling) by Matt Pocock (MIT, Copyright (c) 2026 Matt Pocock). See [THIRD-PARTY.md](../../THIRD-PARTY.md).