grilling
SkillDev toolsGrill 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.
Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.
No other account needed.
Connect ahel once, and every AI you use reads what you have installed.
Then ask your AI: use the grilling skill
What this skill tells your AI
The instructions your AI receives, as published by tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal in skills/productivity/grilling/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.
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.
Question format
Lead each round with a fixed header, then emit every frontier question in one shape. Use emoji as structure anchors and question-type signals — not decoration in every sentence.
Round header:
🔥 **Round N** · K questions
Each question (one type emoji before the number):
<type> **QN** - **<question title>**
<body — prose and/or multiple choices>
💡 <your recommended answer>
Round footer (after the last question):
👇 Reply by number: `1) … 2) … 3) …`
Type emoji (pick one that fits the decision)
| Type | Emoji | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| Scope / in-or-out | 🎯 | Boundary, YAGNI, what ships now |
| Trade-off | ⚖️ | A vs B, pick one path |
| Risk / failure | ⚠️ | What breaks, abuse cases, rollback |
| Naming / language | 🏷️ | Terms, glossary, how we say it |
| UX / UI | 👀 | What someone sees or clicks |
| Data / state | 🧩 | Model shape, transitions, schema |
| Cost / perf | ⚡ | Latency, money, scale |
| Auth / trust | 🔐 | Permissions, tenancy, secrets |
| Timing | ⏱️ | When, sequencing, milestones |
| Challenge | 🪞 | "Do you actually need this?" |
| Dependency | 🔗 | Blockers, prerequisites |
| Open / foggy | 💭 | Still ill-formed; need a direction |
Fixed skeleton (do not invent alternatives each round): 🔥 round · type emoji + QN · 💡 recommendation · 👇 reply prompt.
Keep the body text clean — at most one optional mood emoji in the round header line if it helps (e.g. a long session), never a spray of emoji inside the question body.
Round loop
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.
Signals
- GitHub stars
- 161
- Forks
- 17
- Last commit
- Sep 2026
- Hacker News mentions
- 1
Advanced
- Catalog kind
- skill
- Gateway key
grilling-tt-a1i- Source
- github.com/tt-a1i/matt-skills-with-to-goal