grilling

A guided, detailed interview about a software plan or design. It examines decisions one at a time until the user and agent share the same understanding.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps stress-test architecture, clarify requirements, and decide between design options. It can inspect the codebase when existing code can answer a question.
Why use it?
It finds missing details, dependencies, and unresolved choices before implementation begins.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the mattpocock-skills plugin — 36 skills 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/refo/claude-dev-helpers/grilling
Any agent
npx skills add refo/claude-dev-helpers --skill grilling
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/refo/claude-dev-helpers

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install mattpocock-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 36 skills.

Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 127 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% 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 $0.00036 $0.00127
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00063
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00025
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00013

Measured 2d ago against content hash fe00af3e1815, 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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to grilling — 0 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.

plugins/mp/skills/skills/productivity/grilling/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, waiting for feedback on each question before continuing. Asking multiple questions at once is bewildering.

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. 2d ago First seen · 11 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A fe00af3e1815

Subscribe to this mod's changes

grilling is a skill published in the GitHub repository refo/claude-dev-helpers (2 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 127 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to grilling, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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