Skills mattpocock skills Engineering workflow

grill-with-docs

Use it when:: You want a plan or design stress-tested in a repo, with the terms and decisions written down as you go.
It does:: Questions you in numbered rounds until nothing is left assumed, updating the glossary and decision records as answers settle.
You get:: A sharpened plan, plus new entries in GLOSSARY.md and ADRs (short decision records) in the repo.
Unlike grill-me:: It leaves a paper trail; grill-me runs the same interview and saves nothing.
Runs:: Only when you call it.

Skill 3 of 24 in the Engineering workflow bundle, after ask-matt and before grill-me.

Only works inside its bundle: Its whole SKILL.md loads grilling and domain-modeling. Install Engineering workflow instead.

Calls the grilling and domain-modeling skills.

TL;DR

It combines two other skills from the same bundle. grilling runs the interview: it works through your plan one open decision at a time, asking numbered questions, each with a recommended answer, until every decision is settled, and it looks up facts in your files itself instead of asking you. domain-modeling runs alongside: it calls out words that clash with GLOSSARY.md or are vague ("account": the customer or the user?), invents edge cases, checks your claims against the code, adds each settled term to GLOSSARY.md right away, and offers an ADR only for a decision that is hard to reverse, surprising, and a real trade-off. It's the usual first step of the bundle's workflow when you're working in a repo.

Summarizes the skill at 5beb35b.

npx skills add https://github.com/mattpocock/skills --skill grill-with-docs

skills.sh page Source on GitHub All skills from mattpocock/skills

Total Downloads: 1,300,885 on skills.sh, Nov 9, 2026
Repo stars: 318,714 mattpocock/skills
First seen: Apr 28, 2026 on skills.sh

Weekly Downloads

35.5K

-23% over the 8 weeks to Nov 9

Weekly values

Week to	Installs
Sep 21	46,332
Sep 28	41,794
Oct 5	41,959
Oct 12	52,205
Oct 19	44,944
Oct 26	41,171
Nov 2	37,516
Nov 9	35,476

Category	category:planning category:software-engineering Make the agent question you and write the plan down before it writes code. Everything for building software: planning, coding, debugging, design, frameworks, cloud, agents and skills.
Type	type:workflow A multi-step process the agent follows: interview, debug, run a TDD loop, review.
Effect	effect:local Its own steps create or change files, git state or local tools.
Needs	needs:none Instructions only. Works in any agent that supports skills.
Publisher	by:community Everyone else. Unverified vendor claims default to community.
Topics	interview domain-modeling docs-writing

SKILL.md

From mattpocock/skills at 5beb35b. Checked daily, last changed Oct 20, 2026.

Frontmatter

name: grill-with-docs
description: A relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design, which also creates docs (ADR's and glossary) as we go.
disable-model-invocation: true

Call the Skill tool twice, for "grilling" and "domain-modeling".