grill-me

grill-me is a skill for Claude Code from evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game. It costs 135 tokens per session (700 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A questioning guide for clarifying the important product, strategy, and direction choices before a substantial build.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to compare options for product direction, user experience, priorities, or other costly-to-change decisions.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of spending time building the wrong thing when the desired outcome is still unclear.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the skin-in-the-game plugin — 6 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to compare options for product direction, user experience, priorities, or other costly-to-change decisions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/grill-me
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.

Any agent
npx skills add evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game --skill grill-me
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skin-in-the-game, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for grill-me

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/grill-me/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/grill-me)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/grill-me"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/grill-me/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for grill-me

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/grill-me"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game/grill-me.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 135 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 700 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00135 $0.00700
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.00350
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00140
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00070

Measured 11d ago against content hash 06a5b529140a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

grill-me 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 11d ago.

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.

skills/grill-me/SKILL.md · 34 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 34 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Grill Me

The most expensive failure in agent-assisted building is confidently building the wrong thing — filling ambiguity with your own assumptions instead of the human's intent. Grilling is the antidote, but it's a scalpel, not a hammer: it fires only at the CEO line — taste, strategy, direction, one-way doors. Below that line, asking is a breach of the contract; decide and move. (See operating-contract.)

When to grill

Grill when a substantial build hinges on a decision that is genuinely the human's:

  • Taste — product feel, voice, identity
  • Strategy — what to build, what to cut, positioning, priorities
  • One-way doors — irreversible or expensive-to-reverse choices

Do NOT grill on architecture, library choices, naming, or anything reversible. If you can change it cheaply later, just decide.

How to grill well

The questions carry the value, so craft them from first principles:

  • The options carry the insight. A weak question is "How should I handle errors?" A first-principles one is: "Failures here are either (a) recoverable → retry, (b) fatal → halt loudly, or (c) silent → log-and-continue. Which is acceptable?" The second forces a decision the human would otherwise discover at 2am.
  • Aim at the one-way doors. Prioritize questions whose wrong answer is expensive to reverse — data model, public interface, what not to build.
  • Each option states pros, cons, and long-term implications in plain English, and you lead with your recommendation and why.
  • 3–5 questions, then build. It's not an interview; it's removing the top sources of rework.

Use the AskUserQuestion tool to present these as multiple choice — low friction for the human, and it forces you to enumerate the real, mutually-exclusive paths rather than asking an open "what do you want?"

Pair every grill with ownership

Grilling must never read as punting. Whenever you raise CEO-line questions, say in the same breath what you're already owning and proceeding on: "I'm owning the schema, the library, and the layout — I only need you on these two." A grill without that boundary is a runaway asking permission for everything; a grill with it is a COO bringing you the one decision that's actually yours. Decide the reversible, escalate the irreversible, and make both halves visible.

Read the full file on GitHub · 34 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. 11d ago First seen · 34 lines · 135 tokens per session scan A 06a5b529140a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

grill-me is a skill published in the GitHub repository evanmcgoogan/skin-in-the-game (1 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 135 tokens to every session and 700 once invoked, about $0.0007 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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