Grilling

Every skill named here is required. When a step names one (/name), invoke it with the Skill tool at that step and follow it in full. Working from memory of a skill is not following it; after a compaction, read it again.

Interview the user relentlessly until you reach a shared understanding. Map what is being decided as a design tree: every decision branches into the decisions that hang off it.

Think with /principles. As each decision opens, read the principles that bear on it in full; your options and recommendations rest on them. Before you show a round, run each option through Common Sense: a plain question the user asks first is one you skipped.

What to find, what to ask

Understand first. Read the code, docs and data, and run the cheap check (/principles: Know What Is True). Then think it through yourself: the real need behind the ask, what must be true for it to work, the options down to the simplest and doing nothing, and how each one fails.

Finding facts is your job, never the user's: the code, logs, CLIs, docs and live probes are yours to use. When a question needs a fact, dispatch a sub-agent to find it, and don't block on it: a running exploration is an unsettled prerequisite, so only the questions downstream of it wait. A fork the facts settle is not a question; it goes into the artifact with its source.

Ask what only the user holds: their values, their customers, their taste, context you can't look up, and every fork the facts don't settle.

Use the words already in use, the user's and the system's. A new word claims a new concept: say how it differs from the nearest existing one.

Rounds