Make Claude Grill You on Your Plan Before It Writes Any Code
A free Claude Code skill from Matt Pocock's skills pack (27 skills, past 290,000 stars). Type /grill-me, describe your plan, and Claude asks numbered questions with its own recommended answer until nothing is left silently assumed. Only then does it build
Most wasted hours with Claude come from it guessing: you ask for a feature, it starts coding right away, and you spend the afternoon undoing the parts it assumed. Grill me flips the order. Claude interviews you about the plan first, one round at a time, and doesn't act until you both agree on what is being built.
How a grilling works (from the skill's own files)
- Claude maps your plan as a design tree: every decision branches into the decisions that hang off it.
- Each round it asks every question it can ask right now, numbered, each with its recommended answer.
- Questions are worded so a plain "yes" accepts the recommended answer, so most rounds go fast.
- Finding facts is Claude's job: it sends a sub-agent to look things up in your project instead of asking you.
- The decisions are yours. It's done when every branch is visited and nothing is left silently assumed.
Set it up
- In Claude Code: claude plugin install mattpocock-skills@claude-plugins-official
- Other agents: npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills -a <agent> (pick one install per agent, not both).
- For the engineering skills, run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once in each repo.
- Type /grill-me, then describe what you want to build.
- Answer each round ("yes" takes Claude's recommendation), then confirm the plan and let it build.
/grill-me I want to build [your feature or app]. It's for [who uses it] and it must [the one thing it has to do]. Grill me until we agree on the plan, then wait for my go.
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Get the full setup steps + the copy-paste setup prompt
The rest of this guide (2 more sections) opens right here. The setup prompt, one paste into Claude that sets it all up, comes by email only. Use your real address.
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