Grill

Overview

Interview the user relentlessly about every aspect of a plan or design until you reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the decision tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one-by-one. For each question, provide your recommended answer.

The goal is not to reach agreement quickly — it is to make every implicit call explicit, so nothing important is left silently assumed.

Grilling is an interview, not an execution — it produces alignment, not artifacts. Every decision surfaced and settled is what the spec stage synthesizes afterward.

When to Use

• User says "grill me", "stress-test this plan", "poke holes in this", "harden this design"
• A plan feels roughly right but unresolved decisions are hiding in it
• Before writing a spec (pre-spec hardening)
• User wants to find soft spots in a design before committing to code
• Before any S2/S3 build — and any S1 build whose ask is ambiguous — where the plan is still fuzzy and the domain language isn't settled (routing: orchestrator/references/risk-routing.md)

Don't use for: