The Skill Leaderboard
Skill reference

grill-me

A relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design.

By Matt Pocock ↗ · Updated 15 Aug 2026

Invoke in Codex$grill-me

Explicit mention in Codex CLI or the IDE extension. In the desktop skill picker, select grill-me. Invocation source ↗

Install for your agent

Author’s command
Terminal · editable skill files
npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

In the installer, choose Codex and select grill-me together with its grilling dependency. The repository README also asks you to include setup-matt-pocock-skills; see the setup note below.

Install source ↗
Repository installer · choose individual skills

Repository setup guidance

The README asks installer users to include setup-matt-pocock-skills and run it once per repository. The skill’s own usage guide describes grill-me as standalone: no repository, no workspace and no setup. Repository configuration supports the collection’s engineering workflows.

Suggested first task

Bring an idea worth questioning.

Start a fresh conversation. Replace the highlighted placeholders.

$grill-me I’m considering [IDEA OR DECISION] for [PROJECT].
The context is in [FILE PATH OR PASTE CONTEXT].
Help me resolve the choices and tradeoffs before I commit to a direction.
  • [IDEA OR DECISION] The decision or idea you want to stress-test
  • [PROJECT] Your project or situation
  • [FILE PATH OR PASTE CONTEXT] An optional context file, or paste the context here (optional)

Prompt template by Skill Leaderboard · suggested, not author text. Skill evidence ↗

Inside SKILL.md

7 lines · 2 parts

This file has no section headings. Here’s its complete structure.

  1. 01–05

    Frontmatter

    Name, original description and the declared disable-model-invocation flag. Invocation policy depends on the agent.

  2. 07

    Delegate to grilling

    Calls the grilling skill, where the interview instructions live.

Full SKILL.mdOriginal source · 7 lines
Pinned source ↗
---
name: grill-me
description: A relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design.
disable-model-invocation: true
---

Call the Skill tool with "grilling".

Dependency: grilling · separate author source.

grilling dependencyOriginal source · 28 lines
Pinned source ↗
---
name: grilling
description: Grill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea. Use when the user wants to stress-test their thinking, or uses any 'grill' trigger phrases.
---

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.

Format a 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.

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.

Original source · Copyright (c) 2026 Matt Pocock. Reproduced under the MIT repository license ↗.

Source & requirements

Checked 4 Oct 2026

This skill

File updated
15 Aug 2026 ↗
Dependency
grilling ↗
Permission manifest
Not declared · access unknown
Skill-specific license
Not declared · see repository license
Skill stars / installs
Not available

No allowed-tools manifest is declared in grill-me or grilling. Effective access comes from your agent configuration. The author describes grill-me as stateless; grilling can dispatch subagents to look up facts.

Parent repository · mattpocock/skills

GitHub stars
277,458 · repo total
Last push
6 Oct 2026
License
MIT
Snapshot
6 Oct 2026

These facts describe the entire collection.

Source pinned to d81f3a1 ↗ · SHA-256 caaf8b8de168 · Author’s usage guide ↗ · Repository installation ↗

Source license & attribution
MIT License

Copyright (c) 2026 Matt Pocock

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.