grill

A structured interview that examines a plan, design, or decision by following every related choice until the open questions are answered.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to question a proposed project, map its decisions, and identify which questions can be answered now or must wait for earlier answers.
Why use it?
It exposes hidden assumptions and creates a shared understanding before work begins. It produces discussion, not files or code.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/emaballarin/ccplugins/grill
Any agent
npx skills add emaballarin/ccplugins --skill grill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/emaballarin/ccplugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 30 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,494 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00030 $0.01494
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00747
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00299
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00149

Measured yesterday against content hash d648692f68de, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

grill scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/whetstone/skills/grill/SKILL.md · 156 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 156 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/ws:grill — interview a plan until nothing is assumed

Interview relentlessly until you and the operator reach a shared understanding of what is being built. Map the subject as a design tree: every decision branches into the decisions that hang off it.

This skill produces understanding, not artifacts. It writes nothing, changes nothing, and does not begin the work. It ends by handing off.

The frontier

The frontier is every decision whose prerequisites are already settled — the questions answerable now, without guessing at answers you have not heard yet. A question whose answer depends on another question still open in this round belongs to a later round, not this one.

Work the tree in rounds. Each round asks the whole frontier, then waits.

The round

1. Compute the frontier, and write it down

Recompute the frontier from everything settled so far, and state its size before anything else: "Frontier this round: 6 questions."

The frontier is fixed before a carrier is chosen. It is never trimmed, merged, or deferred to fit a display format. If the frontier does not fit the carrier, the carrier loses.

2. Ask the whole frontier, each question with a recommendation

Every question carries your recommended answer. A question without one is research you have not done yet — do it first.

❓ **Q1** — **<question title>**: <body; may be several paragraphs, may include
options>

➡️ <your recommended answer, and the one-line reason it is your recommendation>

3. Wait

Do not proceed to the next round, and do not begin any work, until the operator answers.

4. Recompute

Each round of answers reshapes the tree: settled decisions push the frontier outward and unblock what depended on them. Return to step 1.

Carrying a round

This rule governs grilling rounds only. It is a scoped specialisation, not a general policy on AskUserQuestion — outside a round, and in every other skill, the tool's own usage guidance applies unchanged.

Read the full file on GitHub · 156 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 156 lines · 30 tokens per session scan A d648692f68de

Subscribe to this mod's changes

grill is a skill published in the GitHub repository emaballarin/ccplugins (3 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 30 tokens to every session and 1,494 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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