Grill Me

Grill Me is a SKILL.md-format agent skill originally published in the mattpocock/skills GitHub repository. When you invoke it via a slash command like /grill-me, the agent doesn't start building immediately. Instead, it maps out the entire decision surface of your project: architecture choices, data models, user experience flows, edge cases, and dependencies between decisions. Then it works through each branch one at a time, offering recommended answers and waiting for your input before moving on.

A session typically runs 16 to 50 questions depending on project complexity. The premise is that most agent failures aren't model failures; they're spec failures. The agent built exactly what you described, but what you described was underspecified. Grill Me forces shared understanding before any code is written, compressing the iteration cycle that would otherwise play out over several rounds of build-review-correction.

The mattpocock/skills repository, which contains Grill Me, crossed 101,000 GitHub stars in under 90 days from its February 2026 release, one of the fastest growth rates for any developer tooling repo that year. The pattern has since been widely adapted: similar interrogation-first skills appear across Anthropic's official skills repo and community catalogs. Builders who use it frequently describe it as the highest single-change ROI improvement they have made to their agent workflow.