SkillVerdict
All verdicts

grill-me

Install mattpocock/skills

A 5-line wrapper that invokes the substantive grilling skill. Install the pack, not the wrapper alone — no scripts, MIT, user-invoked only.

Verified · Repo on GitHub

What it does

A relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design. Surprise: grill-me/SKILL.md itself is only a few lines — it says 'Call the Skill tool with "grilling"' and sets disable-model-invocation: true (so only you can trigger it). The substance lives in the sibling grilling skill: map decisions as a tree, ask the whole frontier of answerable questions in one round with a recommended answer each, dispatch sub-agents for facts instead of asking you, and do not act until shared understanding is confirmed.

Who made it / license / last checked

Matt Pocock (mattpocock/skills) · License: MIT (repo LICENSE) · Repo last commit checked: 2026-10-29

Install

claude plugin install mattpocock-skills@claude-plugins-official

The Claude Code route now leads the repo README (30 Oct) and installs the whole pack; for other agents the README gives npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills -a <agent>. Crucially, grill-me depends on grilling — installing the wrapper alone leaves it pointing at a skill you do not have. Installing the author's full pack avoids that. We did not execute the installer.

What files / scripts it runs

grill-me/SKILL.md only — no scripts. grilling/SKILL.md likewise instructions-only in our clone.

Pros

  • Zero code execution, tiny surface area
  • User-invoked only — it will not ambush you mid-task
  • The underlying grilling method is concrete, not vibes: frontier rounds, recommended answers, facts delegated to sub-agents

Cons

  • The wrapper alone is useless — dependency is not obvious from its leaderboard page
  • Being interrogated in rounds is the point, but it is slow if you wanted a quick answer

Alternatives

obra/superpowers brainstorming (reviewed here) for a gentler one-question-at-a-time version; a plain 'ask me questions before building' prompt.

Notes

This is the honest shape of a 'shallow' skill done right: a thin alias, clearly delegating, inside a pack where the real skill ships alongside it.

Sources

Checked 19 Oct 2026 (Europe/Madrid) from local clones of the repos above. Repo last-commit is a repo date, not a per-skill release date. Install counts, where quoted, are skills.sh leaderboard figures fetched that day and are distribution, not quality.

Verified on 2026-11-04 through the GitHub API: it has had no commit since the 30 Oct check, so the files, sizes and verdict above still hold. Previous check on 2026-10-30, against a fresh clone (repo commit a496f55, 2026-10-29). Since 19 Oct: grill-me/SKILL.md is unchanged (157 bytes, still just «Call the Skill tool with "grilling"», user-invoked only). The pack-wide plugin install in the README solves the wrapper-without-grilling problem described below. Verdict unchanged.