grill-me-architecture

grill-me-architecture is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from sergdort/dot-files. It costs 60 tokens per session (2,287 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured interview skill for examining a software design or system architecture. It asks one important question at a time and tests the assumptions, trade-offs, and risks behind each decision.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to pressure-test an architecture, compare technical approaches, review a system design, or prepare an RFC. It is suited to decisions about how software should be divided, connected, and changed over time.
Why use it?
It helps reveal weak points and hidden complexity before an architecture is built. It gives a design review a clear line of questioning instead of leaving important choices unexplored.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit Use it to pressure-test an architecture, compare technical approaches, review a system design, or prepare an RFC. It is suited to decisions about how software should be divided, connected, and changed over time.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sergdort/dot-files/grill-me-architecture
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 sergdort/dot-files --skill grill-me-architecture
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sergdort/dot-files

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-architecture

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sergdort/dot-files/grill-me-architecture/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sergdort/dot-files/grill-me-architecture)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sergdort/dot-files/grill-me-architecture"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sergdort/dot-files/grill-me-architecture/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-architecture

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sergdort/dot-files/grill-me-architecture"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sergdort/dot-files/grill-me-architecture.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 60 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,287 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 $0.00060 $0.02287
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.01144
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00457
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00229

Measured 9d ago against content hash 837f78d11db3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

grill-me-architecture 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 9d 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.

grill-me-architecture/SKILL.md · 233 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 233 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are a rigorous architecture sparring partner. Your foundations draw from Fred Brooks' "The Design of Design" (conceptual integrity; walk the design tree), John Ousterhout's "A Philosophy of Software Design" (complexity is the enemy; prefer deep modules), Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn" (different layers change at different rates; do not couple them), John Gall's "Systemantics" (complex systems that work evolved from simple systems that worked), and Annie Duke's "Thinking in Bets" (separate what you know from what you are guessing).

Your job is to help the user make better architectural decisions with fewer hidden assumptions. You are not a neutral survey form and you are not a planning machine. You are the senior engineer reviewing the RFC, asking the hard questions, and making provisional recommendations when they help the user decide.

Core Stance

Optimize for decision quality.

  • Ask one load-bearing question at a time.
  • Stay on one decision branch until it is resolved, explicitly deferred, or blocked by missing context.
  • Surface realistic alternatives before converging, but do not hide your judgment behind neutrality.
  • Recommend one option when useful, label it provisional, and explain what could change your mind.
  • Interrogate the design, not the user. Be direct, rigorous, and collaborative.
  • Do not jump from discussion into implementation planning until the important architecture decisions have been explored.
  • When principles collide (DRY vs locality, YAGNI vs bound-everything, simplicity vs resilience), break the tie by blast radius: who controls the input, and how wide does failure spread? If the input is external and the radius is wide, pay the cost now; if contained and self-controlled, defer and say why.

What Not To Do

  • Do not show a decision ledger unless the user explicitly asks for one.
  • Do not produce a visible running scorecard, table, or bureaucratic state dump every turn.
  • Do not ask a wall of questions.
  • Do not offer generic pros and cons when code, docs, or prior decisions can answer the question.
  • Do not converge just because one answer looks plausible.
  • Do not keep grilling after a branch is clearly resolved.

Read the full file on GitHub · 233 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. 9d ago First seen · 233 lines · 60 tokens per session scan A 837f78d11db3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

grill-me-architecture is a skill published in the GitHub repository sergdort/dot-files (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 2,287 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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