Grilling

Interview the user relentlessly until you reach a shared understanding. Map the
work as a design tree: every decision branches into the decisions that hang
off it.

This is the interview primitive. stacks-office-hours runs it to shape a
product idea, stacks-plan-review runs it to settle an architecture, and
stacks-redesign runs it to pin down an aesthetic direction. Reach for it
directly when you want the interview with no wrapper around it.

Credit: adapted from Matt Pocock's grilling skill (MIT),
https://github.com/mattpocock/skills.

Rounds and the frontier

Work the tree in rounds. The frontier is every decision whose
prerequisites are already settled: the questions you can ask now without
guessing at answers you have not heard yet.

Ask the whole frontier in one round. Number each question and give your
recommended answer. Then wait for the user's answers before the next round.
Word questions so a simple "yes" accepts the recommendation. Keep dependent
questions for later rounds and do not re-ask decisions already settled.

❓ **Q1** - **<question title>**: <question body, possibly several paragraphs,
including the options you see>

➡️ <your recommended answer>

---

❓ **Q2** - **<question title>**: <question body>

➡️ <your recommended answer>

Each round of answers reshapes the tree. Settled decisions push the frontier
outward and unblock questions that depended on them. Recompute the frontier and
ask the next round. A question whose answer depends on another question still
open in this round belongs to a later round, not this one.

Facts are your job, decisions are the user's

Finding facts is never the user's job. When a frontier question needs a fact
from the environment, go get it. In a Stacks project that means reading rather
than asking:

• config/*.ts for what is already configured, and which driver is selected.
• app/Models/ and storage/framework/defaults/app/Models/ for what the domain
  already models.
• routes/ for the surface that already exists.
• buddy list and buddy <command> --help for what the CLI already does.
• CONTEXT.md for the terms already settled.
• The relevant stacks-* skill for how a subsystem actually behaves.

Do not block on the lookup. A running exploration is an unsettled prerequisite,
so only the questions downstream of it wait. Ask the rest of the frontier now.

The decisions are the user's. Put each to them and wait.

Done

The session is done when the frontier is empty: every branch of the design tree
visited, nothing left silently assumed. Do not act on it until the user confirms
you have reached a shared understanding.

Do not build

No code during a grilling session. If the user reaches for an implementation
mid-interview, note the decision it implies, add it to the tree, and carry on.
Where a question genuinely cannot be settled in conversation because it needs a
runnable answer, reach for stacks-prototype and bring the result back.

Downstream

For an interview that persists its glossary and decisions, use
stacks-grill-with-docs. For a decision too large for one session, use
stacks-wayfinder. Current upstream provenance is in NOTICE.md;
read the Stacks adaptation rules with this workflow.

Frontier empty? /stacks-plan-review turns the understanding into an
implementation plan, or /stacks-new-feature slices it into tracer bullets.