grill-me

grill-me is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from nikeyes/stepwise-dev. It costs 49 tokens per session (122 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of cross-examine, Apache-2.0.

An interview guide for examining every important decision in a software plan or design, one question at a time.

In plain words
What is it for?
Stress-testing plans, exploring design choices, resolving branches in a decision tree, and checking the codebase when it can answer a question.
Why use it?
It exposes unclear assumptions, unresolved dependencies, and overlooked alternatives before implementation begins.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the stepwise-core plugin — 13 skills, 5 agents shipped together

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/nikeyes/stepwise-dev/grill-me
Any agent
npx skills add nikeyes/stepwise-dev --skill grill-me
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/nikeyes/stepwise-dev

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install stepwise-core, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 5 agents.

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/nikeyes/stepwise-dev/grill-me.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nikeyes/stepwise-dev/grill-me)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nikeyes/stepwise-dev/grill-me"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nikeyes/stepwise-dev/grill-me.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 49 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 122 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 92% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00049 $0.00122
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.00061
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00024
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00012

Measured 3d ago against content hash 74147eb6010a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 3d 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.

Origin

This is a copy

92% identical to cross-examine — 2 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

core/skills/grill-me/SKILL.md · 11 lines

What it actually says

Interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until we 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.

If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase instead.

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. 3d ago First seen · 11 lines · 49 tokens per session scan A 74147eb6010a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

grill-me is a skill published in the GitHub repository nikeyes/stepwise-dev (24 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 49 tokens to every session and 122 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 92% identical to cross-examine, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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