manastalukdar/ai-devstudio/grilling

Grilling

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.

Rounds

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.

Format each round like so:

❓ **Q1** - **<question title>**: <question body, might be multiple paragraphs, including multiple choices>
 
➡️ <your recommended answer>
 
---
 
❓ **Q2** - **<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.

Facts vs decisions

Finding facts is your job, never the user's. When a frontier question needs a fact from the environment (filesystem, tools, codebase), dispatch a sub-agent to find it. Don't block on it — a running exploration is an unsettled prerequisite, so only questions downstream of it wait; ask the rest of the frontier now.

The decisions are the user's: put each to them and wait.

Completion

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.

Usage

/grilling              ← uses current conversation context
/grilling "add real-time notifications via WebSockets"

This is the primitive. /grill-me and /grill-with-docs are the two named wrappers. /triage, /wayfinder, and /improve-codebase-architecture all call it internally.

Token Optimization

Expected range: 100–300 tokens per round (proportional to frontier size)

Patterns used: Bash for fact-finding sub-agents (avoids asking users for facts available in the environment), early exit (stops when frontier is empty and user confirms shared understanding)

Ported from [mattpocock/skills](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills) with attribution.