grill-me

grill-me is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Justinmendezai/The-Adam-Repo. It costs 55 tokens per session (673 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A focused interview that asks one consequential question at a time about a plan, design, or decision. It continues until the important branches of the decision are resolved.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to clarify goals, scope, success measures, failure cases, and technical choices. It records each decision as the interview progresses.
Why use it?
It exposes vague requirements and hidden choices before implementation begins. This can prevent building the wrong solution and having to redo it.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to clarify goals, scope, success measures, failure cases, and technical choices. It records each decision as the interview progresses.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/justinmendezai/the-adam-repo/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 Justinmendezai/The-Adam-Repo --skill grill-me
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Justinmendezai/The-Adam-Repo

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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/justinmendezai/the-adam-repo/grill-me/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/justinmendezai/the-adam-repo/grill-me)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/justinmendezai/the-adam-repo/grill-me"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/justinmendezai/the-adam-repo/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/justinmendezai/the-adam-repo/grill-me"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/justinmendezai/the-adam-repo/grill-me.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 673 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 $0.00055 $0.00673
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00336
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00135
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00067

Measured 12d ago against content hash c72f383e6d98, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, 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 12d 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 · 54 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 54 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

grill-me

Adapted from Matt Pocock's grill-me. The agent stops being agreeable and starts asking sharp questions until the plan stops branching.

Preamble (once, before the first question)

People are surprised by how many questions this takes. Say why, then ask. Two sentences max. Do not skip.

I'm going to ask a handful of questions so we get this right the first time. Better a short interview now than rebuilding the wrong thing.

Then one question. Do not list the remaining questions.

How to grill

  1. One question at a time. No batches.
  2. Each question must change a decision if answered. Filler questions waste tokens.
  3. Walk the decision tree depth-first. Pick the most consequential unresolved branch. Ask the question that splits it. Wait for the answer. Recurse.
  4. Push back when the answer is hand-wavy. "Make it fast" is not an answer. "p95 < 200ms on a 4-core machine for inputs up to 10k rows" is.
  5. Track resolutions. After each answer, restate the decision in one line. Confirm. Move on.

What to grill

  • Goals: Whose problem? How will we know it's solved? What does failure look like?
  • Scope: What are we explicitly not doing? Why?
  • Constraints: Non-functionals — perf, security, cost, ops. What's the budget for each?
  • Risks: What could make this take 3x longer than expected? What can we prove false cheaply?
  • Alternatives: What else did we consider? Why did we reject them?
  • Dependencies: What does this depend on? Who owns those? When are they ready?

Stop condition

You can stop grilling when:

  • Every goal has a measurable success criterion.
  • Every constraint has a number or a "we don't care".
  • Every risk has either a mitigation or an explicit "accept".
  • The user has said "ship it" or "good enough" with full context.

If you've asked >12 questions and the tree is still branching, stop and write down what you have. Resume later.

Anti-patterns

  • Yes/no questions when "describe X" would surface more.
  • Asking before knowing the answer to a previous question.
  • Letting the user paper over an ambiguity with "we'll figure it out later". Either accept that explicitly as a deferred ADR or push for the answer now.

Read the full file on GitHub · 54 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. 12d ago First seen · 54 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A c72f383e6d98

Subscribe to this mod's changes

grill-me is a skill published in the GitHub repository Justinmendezai/The-Adam-Repo (12 stars, last pushed 18d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 673 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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