---
name: grilling
description: "Work through a code or strategic decision while maintaining its canonical workspace artifact. Use when the user wants to grill, think through, or stress-test a code, product, business, marketing, or strategy decision; choose the branch before asking questions."
---

# grilling

Choose the artifact owner before asking the first question:

| Situation | Load |
|---|---|
| Codebase design, implementation, architecture, or domain terminology | `references/code.md` |
| Product, business, marketing, GTM, offer, positioning, or strategic decision | `references/strategy.md` |

Do not mix branches. If the request materially contains both, settle the strategic decision first,
then start a fresh code-grilling session from the resulting workspace artifact.

## Questions

Never ask grilling questions as inline chat prose. Use the host's structured user-input tool:

- Claude Code: invoke `AskUserQuestion`.
- Codex: invoke `request_user_input` when it is available.

Put only decision-ready questions in that tool, offer the recommended answer first, and group only
independent questions into a single invocation. Do the investigation and analysis in the normal
conversation; use the tool only at the point where user judgment is required.

The code branch uses frontier rounds. The strategy branch is a natural, opinionated working
conversation: investigate first, contribute a point of view, and only ask bounded questions that
need the user's judgment. Facts are the agent's job to investigate; decisions are the user's.

For either branch, the workspace owns the full artifact. In a venture/build repository, update the
artifact and regenerate `docs/index.md`; do not capture the session into the second brain. The
brain sees only the registered `docs/index.md` symlink.

## Next skills

| Next | When |
|------|------|
| `/to-spec` | The resolved decision needs a durable execution contract. |
| `/premortem` | The resolved strategy or design needs an adversarial failure pass. |
| `/handoff` | The resulting artifact will be implemented in a fresh session. |