grill

grill is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from JuliusBrussee/cavekit. It costs 129 tokens per session (870 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A questioning process for turning a vague software idea into a clear goal and set of constraints before writing a specification. It asks one question at a time and records confirmed decisions without guessing unknowns.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when an idea is underspecified, could be interpreted in several ways, or needs to be stress-tested before planning. It helps clarify the goal, definition of done, and constraints.
Why use it?
It exposes unclear assumptions early, when they are cheaper to fix than problems discovered during implementation. It prevents an agent from silently choosing important requirements.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the ck plugin — 8 skills, 7 commands shipped together

About the project

cavekit is a Claude Code plugin that organizes software changes through a compact, spec-driven workflow stored in a SPEC.md file. It is for developers who want to plan, research, review, and build changes while preserving project context across sessions; the catalogue entries are its skills, commands, plugin configuration, and workflow rules.

JuliusBrussee/cavekit · 1,142 stars · on GitHub

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/juliusbrussee/cavekit/grill
Any agent
npx skills add JuliusBrussee/cavekit --skill grill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/cavekit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ck, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 8 skills, 7 commands.

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

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/cavekit/grill.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/cavekit/grill)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/juliusbrussee/cavekit/grill"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/juliusbrussee/cavekit/grill.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 129 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 870 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 $0.00129 $0.00870
Opus 5 $0.00064 $0.00435
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00174
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00087

Measured 4d ago against content hash 09548e80e581, 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 4d 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/SKILL.md · 83 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

grill — sharpen idea before spec

One question at a time. Every answer lands in a § or gets parked ?. Never guess a constraint into existence.

Plan-then-execute guesses the fuzzy parts & builds the wrong thing. Grill drags the fuzz into §G/§C before a single §T row exists. A bad assumption caught here costs one question. Caught in §B it costs a bug.

WHEN TO GRILL

  • Idea is one sentence & you can feel the holes.
  • Multiple readings of the goal exist & you are about to pick one silently.
  • Before /spec new on anything non-trivial.
  • User asks to be challenged / stress-tested.

Skip for a typo or a one-line fix. Grill scales to uncertainty, ⊥ to ego.

CALIBRATE FIRST

One opening read, not a quiz:

  1. How well does user know this domain? (sets question depth)
  2. How locked is the idea? (exploring vs committed)
  3. Pressure wanted: light / normal / brutal.

Match it. Brutal grilling on a half-formed idea just demoralizes. Light grilling on a committed plan misses the load-bearing flaw.

QUESTION LADDER

Climb in order. Each rung, ask one question, recommend an answer, wait.

  1. Goal — what must the code do, in one line? (→ §G)
  2. Done — how do we know it works? name the observable. (→ §C / future §V)
  3. Boundary — what is explicitly out of scope? (→ §C)
  4. Lock — what tech/lib/pattern is non-negotiable? what is forbidden? (→ §C)
  5. Surface — what does the outside world touch — cmd, api, file, env? (→ §I)
  6. Edge — the one input that breaks the happy path? (→ future §V)
  7. Unknown — what do we not know yet? (→ park as ? §C bullet)

Stop climbing the moment the spec would be unambiguous. Do not ask all seven by reflex.

ANSWER FORMAT

Each question carries a recommended answer so the user can grunt "yes" & move:

Q: auth — session cookie or JWT? rec: JWT — stateless, you named horizontal scaling as a §C. (a) JWT (b) cookie (c) something else?

HANDOFF

When done, emit a compact block — goal line, constraint bullets, surfaced unknowns as ? — and hand to the spec skill to write §G/§C. Grill proposes; spec is the sole mutator. Never write SPEC.md directly.

Read the full file on GitHub · 83 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. 4d ago First seen · 83 lines · 129 tokens per session scan A 09548e80e581

Subscribe to this mod's changes

grill is a skill published in the GitHub repository JuliusBrussee/cavekit (1,142 stars, last pushed 20d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 129 tokens to every session and 870 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-30.

Related

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Primary entry point for the spec-superflow state-machine workflow. Invoke when the user is inside an active spec-superflow change directory (look for .spec-superflow.yaml, changes/ /, proposal.md, specs/, design.md, tasks.md, or execution-contract.md) and asks to start, continue, resume, implement, plan, or figure out…

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bug-investigator

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior during spec-superflow execution, before proposing fixes. Invoked automatically when build-executor hits a blockage.

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spec-writer

Create or refine spec-superflow planning artifacts. Invoke when the change is understood well enough to write proposal.md, specs/, design.md, and tasks.md.

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Convert approved planning artifacts into an execution contract. Invoke when the user wants to start building, asks to move from planning to implementation, or when execution-contract.md is missing or stale.

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