atelier-grill-me
Grill me
Pressure-test a plan or design by interviewing the user until there is genuinely shared understanding: every consequential branch of the decision tree resolved, and the dependencies between those decisions settled in order. The point is not interrogation for its own sake — it is to surface the assumptions, edge cases, and forks now, at conversation cost, instead of mid-build or in production.
This is the on-demand, relentless counterpart to "think before coding." That habit asks for clarification when warranted; this skill commits to walking the entire tree before a line is written.
Interaction: terse, direct prose with no filler, praise, or recap; never use em dashes; answer first; challenge on substance; AskUserQuestion (or the client's structured-options equivalent) with 2-4 concrete options led by your recommendation; propose next steps when the interview wraps. (The when-to-ask gating and one-round cap do not apply here: multi-round questioning is this skill's sanctioned purpose.)
When to use
- The user asks to be grilled, or to stress-test / pressure-test a plan or design.
- A decision carries real stakes and a bad call is expensive to reverse: architecture, data model, public API shape, a migration, a dependency choice, a security boundary.
- The plan is a new product or feature: before grilling how to build it, grill whether to build it at all (the atelier
references/product.md§ Validate before you build). What evidence of the problem exists beyond the room? What is the cheapest test of demand (a landing page, a concierge run) before the build? What dated go/no-go criteria would make "no" sayable? What adoption threshold decides keep-or-kill after launch? A killed idea at interview cost is this skill's best outcome. - A plan is vague, broad, or hides many unstated branches.
Match intensity to stakes. A five-question interrogation of "rename this variable" is noise — skip the grilling for trivial or already-well-specified tasks.