Voyage Digital
    Tools· Strategy & Decision-Making

    grill-me

    grill-me is an external skill repository by Matt Pocock that clarifies plans and designs through persistent questioning, branch by branch, before any code is written.

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    Source code
    Clone the repository, move the skills/productivity/grill-me folder to ~/.claude/skills/, alternatively obtain it through a plugin marketplace.
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    grill-me

    Description

    grill-me is part of "Skills for Real Engineers", the public skill collection by developer Matt Pocock, taken directly from his own .agents directory. The skill addresses a typical gap between human and agent: before any code is written, Claude systematically questions the user about a plan or design, works through the decision tree branch by branch, and, where needed, automatically searches the codebase to answer questions that can be derived from the existing code.

    The skill is deliberately kept stateless: it runs the interview in a single pass, without saving intermediate states or handing the plan off to another model. The value lies in the thoroughness of the questions themselves, not in a model handoff. Anyone who wants an additional adversarial cross-check combines grill-me manually with a separate reviewer such as the Codex CLI, the way it is established practice at Voyage.

    Strengths

    Systematic branch logic
    The interview works through a plan's decision tree branch by branch until no open question remains.
    Automatic codebase cross-check
    Where needed, the skill searches the existing codebase on its own to answer questions that can already be derived from the code.
    Model- and agent-independent
    As part of a small, composable skill collection, grill-me works with any model and, via the skills.sh installer, also installs into Codex and other Agent-Skills-standard harnesses.
    Two install philosophies
    Available either editable in your own project through the skills.sh installer, or as a read-only, always-current Claude Code plugin.
    Wide adoption
    According to the author, grill-me is, alongside grill-with-docs, among the most-used skills in the collection.

    Assessment

    AI features

    • Guided interview Claude systematically questions the user about a plan or design, working through every branch of the decision tree.
    • Codebase research Where an answer already lives in the existing code, the model searches the codebase itself instead of asking.
    • Reusable grilling logic The interview loop runs as a separate, model-invoked skill called grilling, shared by grill-me and grill-with-docs.

    Suitable for

    • Teams that want to explicitly clarify every open branch of a plan before implementation, instead of carrying silent assumptions forward
    • Solo developers and small teams who need a second, uncomfortable opinion before critical code
    • Clarifying open questions before documentation and code work, optionally combined with a separate reviewer
    • A complement to an existing /codex workflow, as an additional grilling layer before important commits

    Limitations and notes

    • No state between sessions The interview runs in a single pass; intermediate states are not saved. Handing work off across sessions requires a separate step, such as the handoff skill from the same collection.
    • No built-in model handoff grill-me does not automatically pass the clarified plan to a second, adversarial reviewer. Anyone who wants that combines the skill manually with a separate tool such as the Codex CLI.
    • Setup step before first use Before first use in a project, /setup-matt-pocock-skills has to run once, among other things to choose the issue tracker and triage labels.
    • For software work, grill-with-docs fits better grill-me is meant for non-code use cases. For work involving a domain model, the collection's grill-with-docs variant additionally maintains CONTEXT.md and Architecture Decision Records.

    Quick start

    1. Run the installer: npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills, or alternatively as a Claude Code plugin via /plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills and /plugin install mattpocock-skills@mattpocock.
    2. During the skill picker, select grill-me as well as /setup-matt-pocock-skills.
    3. Run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once per repository: it sets the issue tracker, triage labels and where documents get saved.
    4. Call /grill-me with your own plan or design and work through the interview branch by branch.

    Tips

    • For work with a software domain model, use /grill-with-docs instead, which additionally maintains CONTEXT.md and Architecture Decision Records.
    • Use the skill for every planned change, not only big decisions, as the author recommends.
    • Installing via skills.sh keeps the skill editable in the project; installing via the plugin marketplace keeps it read-only and always current. Choose based on how much you want to edit it.
    • For handoffs across multiple sessions, add the separate handoff skill from the same collection.

    Access

    The repository is publicly available at https://github.com/mattpocock/skills, with the skill itself in the subfolder skills/productivity/grill-me. Installation: clone the repository and move the folder to ~/.claude/skills/, alternatively obtain it through a plugin marketplace where listed. The repository is licensed under MIT (copyright Matt Pocock, 2026), confirmed by the LICENSE file in the repository.

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