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mattpocock on GitHub

Grilling

Free

Relentlessly stress-test your ideas and decisions.

by mattpocock212.7k stars on mattpocock/skills
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Updated Aug 6, 2026
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Free · Opens the source repo

What Grilling does

Grilling is a skill designed to help users rigorously evaluate their plans, decisions, or ideas through a structured questioning process. By employing a methodical approach, this skill creates a design tree that maps out every decision and its subsequent branches. Each decision is explored in rounds, allowing users to clarify their thoughts and reach a shared understanding of their ideas. This is particularly useful for individuals who need to refine their concepts or ensure that all aspects of a decision are thoroughly considered.

The process begins with the skill presenting a series of questions based on the current frontier of decisions that have been settled. Each question is clearly numbered and formatted, making it easy for users to follow along. Users are encouraged to provide their answers, which then reshape the design tree and expand the frontier for the next round of questioning. This iterative approach ensures that no assumptions are left unexamined, and every branch of the design tree is visited before concluding the session.

One of the key features of Grilling is its ability to find facts autonomously. When a question requires information that the user does not have at hand, the skill can dispatch a sub-agent to gather that information without interrupting the flow of the session. This keeps the exploration dynamic and allows users to focus on the decisions that need to be made, rather than getting bogged down in data collection.

Grilling is ideal for professionals, designers, and anyone involved in decision-making processes who wants to ensure that their thinking is rigorous and well-structured. By using this skill, users can clarify their ideas, identify potential pitfalls, and ultimately make more informed decisions.

When to use it

Use Grilling when you want to rigorously assess a plan or decision, especially when clarity and thoroughness are needed.

When not to use it

This skill may not be suitable for quick brainstorming sessions or when immediate action is required without extensive analysis.

What you can build with it

Evaluating a Business Strategy

Use Grilling to dissect and refine a business strategy by exploring every decision and its implications.

Designing a New Product

Stress-test your product design decisions with Grilling to ensure all aspects are thoroughly considered.

Clarifying Project Goals

Apply Grilling to clarify project goals and ensure that all team members have a shared understanding of the objectives.

How to install Grilling

View source

1. Install with the skills CLI

npx skills add mattpocock/skills/grilling --agent claude-code

2. Or install it manually

Download the skill folder and drop it into ~/.claude/skills/ for all projects, or .claude/skills/ to scope it to one repo. Restart Claude Code so it picks up the new skill.

Anthropic's agentic coding CLI, and the reference implementation of Agent Skills. Drop a skill folder into ~/.claude/skills and Claude Code loads it automatically whenever a task matches the skill's description. Claude Code docs

Inside SKILL.md

Written by mattpocock

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

Work the tree in rounds. The frontier is every decision whose prerequisites are already settled — the questions you can ask now without guessing at answers you haven't heard yet. Ask the whole frontier in one round: number each question and give your recommended answer. Then wait for the user's answers before the next round.

Each question should be formatted like so:

❓ **Q1** - **<question title>**: <question body, might be multiple paragraphs, including multiple choices>

➡️ <your recommended answer>

Each round the user answers reshapes the tree — settled decisions push the frontier outward and unblock questions that depended on them. Recompute the frontier and ask the next round. A question whose answer depends on another question still open in this round belongs to a later round, not this one.

Finding facts is your job, never the user's. When a frontier question needs a fact from the environment (filesystem, tools, etc.), dispatch a sub-agent to find it — don't ask the user for anything you could look up yourself. Don't block on it: a running exploration is an unsettled prerequisite, so only the questions downstream of it wait for the sub-agent to report — ask the rest of the frontier now. The decisions are the user's — put each to them and wait.

The session is done when the frontier is empty: every branch of the design tree visited, nothing left silently assumed. Do not act on it until the user confirms you have reached a shared understanding.

Frequently asked questions about Grilling

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