Grilling Open Decisions

Interview the user relentlessly about a plan, ticket, or design until you reach a shared understanding. The purpose is alignment before work starts: a change built on a wrong assumption costs the whole implementation, plus the review, browser walk, and merge that followed it. A question asked up front costs one click; the same question asked mid-implementation costs the user's context switch and stalls the run until they are back.

Take no action on the subject of the grilling until the user confirms the understanding is shared.

The loop

1. Look up every fact yourself (see Facts vs decisions). Arrive at the interview already knowing the code.
2. Map the decision tree. Every open decision branches into the decisions that hang off it.
3. Settle what the ticket and the evidence settle. Work every open decision through the five parts of a decision brief. What the ticket states clearly is recorded in its words; a gap the evidence leaves exactly one option for is recorded with its Beleg:; everything else stays open for the user (Settle or ask).
4. Re-check every remaining question against the sources before it goes out (Re-check before asking). A question the sources already answer costs the user a decision they never needed to make.
5. Ask the frontier as one round. The frontier is every open decision whose prerequisites are already settled: the questions you can ask now without guessing at an answer you have not heard yet. A question that depends on another question still open in this round belongs to a later round.
6. Present every question with its brief. The brief ends in your recommendation, so the user decides in one click with the facts in view, without reading the code first or composing a design from scratch.
7. Recompute the frontier after each round: settled decisions push it outward, unblock questions that depended on them, and often retire questions or make them clear enough to settle from the evidence. Re-check and ask the next round.
8. Stop when the frontier is empty: every branch visited, nothing left silently assumed. Write the decision record and let the user confirm it.

Settle or ask