Agent skill · nousresearch
grill-me
Adversarial plan interview before implementation.
What it needs
About 3k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Grill Me Stress-tests a plan through structured adversarial questioning before any code is written. Models the plan as a design tree — every decision branches into the decisions that hang off it — and interviews the user in rounds until every branch is resolved and nothing is silently assumed. Combines the phase discipline of the original with the frontier-rounds mechanic from mattpocock/skills' grilling. When to Use User says "grill me", "interview my plan", "stress test this idea" Before complex work: auth flows, schema changes, migrations, payments A plan has unresolved decisions or seems vague Before subagent-driven-development decomposition Do NOT use for existing code (use requesting-code-review) or simple one-off tasks. Prerequisites None. The skill works on any plan or raw idea. Core Mechanic: Frontier Rounds Map the plan as a design tree. 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. Work in rounds: ask the whole current frontier in one message, numbered, each question carrying your recommended answer. Then wait. A question whose answer depends on another question still open in this round belongs to a LATER round, not this one. Format each round like so: Each answer reshapes the tree: settled decisions push the frontier outward and unblock dependent questions. Recompute the frontier and ask the next round. Facts are your job; decisions are the user's. When a frontier question needs a fact from the environment (codebase, filesystem, config, docs), find it yourself with searchfiles / readfile / terminal — or dispatch a subagent via delegatetask for a heavy exploration. Never ask the user for anything you could look up. Don't block on an exploration: only the questions downstream of it wait; ask the rest of the frontier now. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills nousresearch/grill-me