grilling

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# Grilling

Interview relentlessly until you and the user share an understanding of the
thing. Not a conversation that wanders toward clarity: a tree, worked
systematically.

## The tree and the frontier

Map the problem as a **design tree**. Every decision branches into the decisions
that hang off it.

The **frontier** is every decision whose prerequisites are already settled —
the questions answerable *now*, without guessing at answers you have not heard
yet. That word is doing the work: it is what separates this from asking
questions in the order they occur to you.

A question whose answer depends on another question still open belongs to a
later round, not this one. Asking it now produces an answer the user will
revise, and revised answers quietly invalidate everything built on them.

## Rounds

Ask the whole frontier in one round. Then wait.

Each answer reshapes the tree: settled decisions push the frontier outward and
unblock questions that depended on them. Recompute the frontier and ask the next
round.

Every question carries your recommended answer. A bare question makes the
user do the thinking twice. A recommendation they can accept, reject, or amend
costs them one judgment instead.

Ask in numbered plain text, one block per question, with the options inline
where there are any. Use the `AskUserQuestion` picker only when the user asks
for it by name: a picker hides the tradeoffs a recommendation needs.

```text
Q1 — <question title>
<the question, including the options if there are any>
Recommended: <your answer, and the one-line reason>
```

## Facts are yours, decisions are theirs

Look up anything the environment can answer instead of asking. File contents,
which version is installed, what the config already says, whether a thing
already exists: go and look. A question the codebase settles is a question that
wastes the user's turn and signals you did not check.

When a frontier question needs a fact you do not have, dispatch the lookup and
keep going. A running exploration is an unsettled prerequisite, so only the
questions downstream of it wait. Ask the rest of the frontier now rather than
blocking the round on one lookup.

Delegate the lookup rather than doing it inline where the search is broad or the
output is large — the point is to keep the interview in the main thread and the
file-reading out of it.

The decisions are the user's. Put each one to them and wait: a decision
inferred from a previous answer, or taken from silence, is one the user never
made.

## Done

The session is done when the frontier is empty: every branch visited, nothing
left silently assumed.

Do not act on the design until the user confirms you have reached a shared
understanding. Reaching the end of the questions is not the same as agreement.

From fblissjr/fb-claude-skills, Apache-2.0.

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