The Claude Code grill-me skill is a simple but powerful fix for one of the most frustrating problems in AI-assisted development: Claude jumping straight into building before it fully understands what you need. Ex-Vercel engineer Matt Pocock shared this three-line skill that forces Claude Code to interview you relentlessly before writing a single line of code — and it takes less than a minute to install.

Why Claude Code Skips Straight to Building (And Why That’s a Problem)

By default, Claude Code is eager. You describe a feature, it drafts a plan, and 20 minutes later you’re staring at code that missed half your requirements. The model makes assumptions about edge cases, skips dependency decisions, and resolves ambiguities on its own — often incorrectly. The result is wasted time, wasted tokens, and a codebase that drifts further from what you actually wanted. The grill-me skill exists to close that gap before it opens.

How to Install the Claude Code grill-me Skill

There are two ways to install the skill. The fastest is a single terminal command using the npx skills package:

npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills/grill-me

This automatically creates the skill file in the correct location inside your project. If you prefer to do it manually — or want to inspect the file before running anything — create the following file path in your project root:

.claude/skills/grill-me/SKILL.md

Then paste this exact content into the file:

Interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until we reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the design tree resolving dependencies between decisions one by one.

If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase instead.

For each question, provide your recommended answer.

Save the file and you’re done. The skill is now available inside any Claude Code session running in that project directory. For more on how artificial intelligence coding tools are evolving, check our AI coverage.

How to Use /grill-me Before Starting a New Feature

Once installed, using the skill is straightforward. Before you describe a new feature or ask Claude Code to build anything, type:

/grill-me

Claude Code will immediately shift into interview mode. Instead of drafting a plan and running with it, it will walk you through your feature one question at a time. For each question, it does three things:

  • It asks a focused question about one specific aspect of the design or requirements.
  • It suggests its own recommended answer based on what it already knows about your codebase.
  • It explores the codebase directly if the answer can be found there, rather than asking you unnecessarily.

This process continues — branching through dependencies and edge cases — until both you and Claude Code have reached a shared, documented understanding of exactly what needs to be built. Only then should you proceed to implementation.

What Makes This Skill Work So Well

The three lines inside SKILL.md are doing more work than they appear to. The phrase “walk down each branch of the design tree” is the key instruction — it forces Claude Code to treat your feature as a tree of decisions rather than a single prompt, resolving upstream choices before moving to downstream ones. The instruction to explore the codebase instead of asking redundant questions keeps the interview efficient. And asking Claude to provide its own recommended answer for each question means you’re not just answering a blank form — you’re reviewing and correcting a draft, which is significantly faster.

Matt Pocock, who built this skill during his time working on Vercel‘s developer tooling, described the core problem it solves: most AI coding failures happen not because the model can’t write code, but because the requirements were never fully specified. The grill-me skill makes requirement specification a structured, collaborative step rather than an afterthought. Developers working with computers and laptops across any stack can benefit from this workflow.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of /grill-me

A few practices will make the skill even more effective in your workflow:

  • Run it at the start of every non-trivial feature. Even if you think the requirements are obvious, the interview often surfaces assumptions you didn’t know you were making.
  • Don’t rush the answers. When Claude suggests a recommended answer, take a moment to actually evaluate it. Correcting a wrong assumption here costs seconds; correcting it after implementation costs hours.
  • Let it explore the codebase. If Claude Code says it’s going to look at a file before asking you a question, let it. This is the skill working as intended — reducing unnecessary back-and-forth.
  • Use it across projects. Install the skill in every project where you use Claude Code. The .claude/skills/ directory is project-scoped, so you’ll need to add it once per repo.

The grill-me skill is a small addition to your developer workflow that pays back its setup cost on the very first feature you use it for. Install it once, run it before every build, and stop shipping code that misses the point.