Grilling

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 fact can be found by exploring the codebase, look it up rather than asking me. The decisions, though, are mine — put each one to me and wait for my answer.

Do not enact the plan until I confirm we have reached a shared understanding.

When to grill proactively

"If in doubt" is too weak a trigger — an agent handed a concrete task rarely feels in doubt, even when it hides consequential decisions. Grill before acting, not only when asked, whenever a step would:

• change or restart a running service or process (a training run, a server, a scheduled job);
• allocate a shared resource — GPUs, ports, memory, disk, a rate-limited API quota;
• edit an interdependent config whose blast radius you cannot fully see;
• invalidate or contradict a decision already made this session.

In these cases, surface the conflict explicitly and grill on how to resolve it before proceeding.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: dgilford
• Source: dgilford/ai-science-toolkit
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.