My 'Grill Me' Skill Has Gone Viral: Why Everyone Needs It

The /grill-me skill has taken off, quickly becoming one of the most flexible and powerful tools in my AI toolkit. Whether you're a developer stress-testing a new plan or just someone looking to clarify your thinking, this skill is a game-changer.

What is the Grill Me Skill?

At its core, grill-me is designed to interview you relentlessly about a plan or design until you reach a shared understanding. It walks down each branch of your decision tree, resolving dependencies and surfacing every important detail. If a question can be answered by exploring your codebase, it does that too.

Skill definition:

name: grill-me
description: Interview the user relentlessly about a plan or design until reaching shared understanding, resolving each branch of the decision tree. Use when user wants to stress-test a plan, get grilled on their design, or mentions "grill me".

How Does It Work?

The skill asks you question after question, providing its recommended answer for each. If the answer is obvious, you can just say "yes" and move on, speeding up the process. This continues until you and the AI have covered every angle and reached a shared understanding. At the end, you get a summary of what you've discussed.

Why Is It So Effective?

This approach is fantastic for the early phases of coding, where you need to discover all requirements by talking them through. It's the AI-powered version of rubber ducking—the classic developer technique of explaining your idea out loud until you figure out all the details.

But it doesn't stop at coding. I've used grill-me for non-coding challenges too, like planning a new course or brainstorming ideas. Just tweak the prompt slightly, and you get the same relentless, insightful questioning for any topic.

Real-World Impact

These grilling sessions often last about 45 minutes, resulting in a rich, context-filled conversation and a clear plan of action. That's why grill-me is so powerful—it's a universal tool for anyone who needs to clarify their thinking, whether for code or life.

Try It Yourself

You can install the skill with:

npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills/grill-me

Or check out the skills repo on GitHub to get started.

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If you want to see the original announcement and more details, check out the viral post here.