/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: