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Grill-Me Skill

A tiny Claude Code skill from matt-pocock whose job is to flip the interview direction: instead of the human prompting the AI, the AI interrogates the human until both agree on what is being built.

"It's the grill-me skill. And this grill-me skill is wonderfully small, wonderfully tiny, and it helps prevent one of I think the main issues when you're working with an AI, which is misalignments." — Pocock, 12:19

The skill body (paraphrased from repo)

Interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until we reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the decision tree resolving dependencies one by one. For each question provide your recommended answer. Ask the questions one at a time.

That's essentially all of it — a few lines of markdown with a pull-trigger description header.

Why it works

  • Alignment precedes output. Pocock cites Frederick P. Brooks (The Design of Design): successful collaborators converge on a shared design concept. Plan mode fails because the agent rushes to produce a plan artifact; grill-me forces a conversation instead.
  • Provides recommendations. Every question ships with the model's own best guess, so the human can ratify rather than author — ~22 resolved questions in a typical session in the demo.
  • Catches silent gaps. In the workshop example ("should points be retroactive on existing lesson progress?"), the grill surfaced a requirement the client (Sarah Chen) had never articulated.
  • Pairs with a fresh session. The ~25K tokens burned here are "gold" and are then compressed into a PRD — see prd-as-destination — before clearing for the next phase.