Grill before you capture
/task:grill is the optional pre-capture step. It sits at the very first stage of the pipeline — "discuss freely in chat" — and gives that discussion teeth. It interrogates a plan or decision one question at a time, keeps a running ledger of what you decided and why, ends with a pre-mortem, then routes you to the right capture skill.
It writes nothing. Its whole output is a hardened discussion plus a decision ledger that a to-* skill then serializes.
Why grill before you capture
A capture skill freezes a discussion into a file. If the discussion was fuzzy, the file is fuzzy. grill is where you pressure-test the thinking before it's frozen — so to-plan / to-spec / to-task / to-roadmap serialize something that's already been examined.
Where it comes from
grill descends from Matt Pocock's grill-me — the interrogate-before-you-build idea that made the case interrogation belongs before code. This one adds a decision ledger, recommendations that are allowed to disagree with you rather than rubber-stamp, a closing pre-mortem, and routing into capture — the part grill-me leaves open: somewhere to put the answers.
How it works
/task:grill the retry design- It frames the target — states, in a sentence or two, the decision it's about to attack.
- It resolves facts itself. Anything the codebase can answer — what a file does, whether a library is already a dependency — it looks up with plain tools. It spends questions only on genuine decisions.
- It grills, one question at a time. Each question is a real fork with 2–4 concrete options and a recommendation. The first chip is its honest recommended answer — and if your leaning looks like the weaker call, the recommendation will say so rather than agree by reflex.
- It keeps a ledger. After each answer it echoes one new line:
{the decision} — because {the reason}. - It ends with a pre-mortem — one kill-shot question, like "this shipped and failed; what was the cause?" — and folds the answer into the ledger.
- It prints the full ledger and routes you onward.
A typical grill is 3–7 questions. It chases the one answer that would change everything, not ten that wouldn't.
No config needed
grill is the one skill that neither reads nor writes anything under .task/ — config.md included. It runs in a fresh, unconfigured project, before any capture exists. Its dialog mirrors the language of your chat.
Where it routes you
When the interrogation is done, grill diagnoses what you actually grilled and points at exactly one next skill:
| What the ledger turned out to be | Routes to |
|---|---|
| Load-bearing "we chose X over Y because…" technical reasoning | /task:to-spec |
| One task, approach settled | /task:to-plan |
| One task, approach still open | /task:to-task |
| An initiative that sprawled into several tasks | /task:to-roadmap |
It doesn't run the capture skill for you — the footer is the handoff. You review the ledger, then run the suggested command.
→ Next: Roadmaps — capturing a multi-task initiative.