grilling

An interview process for pressure-testing a software plan or design before coding begins. It asks one question at a time and continues until the important decisions are settled.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when you explicitly want a plan reviewed through detailed questioning. It explores alternatives, checks dependencies, and waits for agreement before work starts.
Why use it?
It exposes unclear requirements and unresolved design choices before they become implementation problems.

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/jjilli/fable-flow/grilling
Any agent
npx skills add jjilli/fable-flow --skill grilling
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jjilli/fable-flow

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 105 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 421 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 $0.00105 $0.00421
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00211
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00084
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00042

Measured 2d ago against content hash ae312c872789, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

grilling 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 2d 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/grilling/SKILL.md · 37 lines

What it actually says

Grilling

Invoke this only when the user explicitly asks to be grilled (or to grill the plan/design). It is intentionally heavier than normal clarification — a relentless interview, not a few questions. If the user hasn't asked for it, don't start it.

When they have:

Interview the user relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until you reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the design tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one by one. For each question, provide your recommended answer.

Ask the questions one at a time, waiting for feedback on each before continuing. Asking multiple questions at once is bewildering.

If a fact can be found by exploring the codebase, look it up rather than asking — spend the user's attention only on decisions. The decisions are theirs: put each one to them and wait for the answer.

Do not enact the plan until the user confirms you have reached a shared understanding.

In this pipeline, grilling sits before /fable-flow:plan — it hardens the task and its design decisions so the architect plans against a settled intent rather than guesses. Once grilling ends in a shared understanding, feed the resolved decisions into the task (.fable-flow/task.md) and proceed to planning.


Adapted from Matt Pocock's grilling skill — https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/blob/main/skills/productivity/grilling/SKILL.md

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. 2d ago First seen · 37 lines · 105 tokens per session scan A ae312c872789

Subscribe to this mod's changes

grilling is a skill published in the GitHub repository jjilli/fable-flow (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 105 tokens to every session and 421 once invoked, about $0.0005 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

agent-harness-fault-injection

Use when an agent workflow needs deterministic recovery evidence for sandbox, MCP/tool, worker, checkpoint, memory, or orchestration failures.

sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills · 34 tokens

hedging-strategy

Hedging strategy design (beta hedge / option protection / tail risk / cross-asset hedging), including hedge-ratio calculation and cost evaluation.

HKUDS/Vibe-Trading · 35 tokens

foundry-config-setup

Resolve missing setup caused by a hardcoded Foundry project endpoint or model in a sample. Use when a sample fails because it uses a placeholder/hardcoded projectendpoint (for example "https://your-project.services.ai.azure.com") or a hardcoded model instead of reading them from the environment.

microsoft/agent-framework · 65 tokens

oma-scholar

Scholarly research companion using Knows sidecar spec (.knows.yaml). Generates, validates, reviews, queries, and compares structured research-paper sidecars, and fetches them from knows.academy. Use for academic literature search, survey synthesis, paper authoring assistance, and peer review with token-efficient…

first-fluke/oh-my-agent · 73 tokens

oma-hwp

Convert HWP / HWPX / HWPML files to Markdown using kordoc. Extracts text, headings, tables, lists, images, footnotes, and hyperlinks. Use for Korean word processor files (Hangul), government documents, and AI-ready data preparation.

first-fluke/oh-my-agent · 59 tokens

error-recovery

Standard recovery patterns for all squad agents. When something fails, adapt — don't just report the failure.

bradygaster/squad · 24 tokens