This AI prompt grills you on your plan before you build it. It interviews you about every part of the plan, one question at a time, and gives its own recommended answer to each question so you can agree or push back.

The viral “grill me” prompt that pressure-tests any plan

There’s an AI skill on GitHub with over 277,000 stars & its dev, Matt Pocock, is still updating it.

If you’re a dev, you’ve probably seen /grill-me. It’s part of a whole suite of skills he put out.

If you had one guess at what this skill does, you’d probably get it right.

The whole thing is wrapped around a single prompt & that prompt does all the heavy lifting. Which means you can run it on any model.

Saves you a bucketful of time & headache before they burn a weekend building the wrong thing, only to get their hearts broken later on.

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. For each question, provide your recommended answer. If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase instead.

The grill me prompt for any plan

Take that last line out and the prompt is wide open. Point it at a course, a product you can’t position, a decision you keep circling.

Then make it give you a TLDR, because the grill-me skill talks more than a toddler on a sugar high.

Interview me relentlessly about [my plan or decision] until we reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the decision tree, resolving dependencies one at a time. For each question, give me your recommended answer. Ask one question at a time and wait for my reply. Keep each turn short, and give me a TLDR at the top of any long answer.

This is the same move as the meal planner prompt. Interview first, answer second.

Original prompt by Matt Pocock. Link

When you’re still at the idea stage

If you only have an idea so far, the find holes prompt has 2 characters argue over it. If the plan is set and you want to know how it could fail, try the pre-mortem prompt. Stuck between 2 plans? The hard decision prompt argues against the one you’re leaning toward.

This teardown first ran in issue 9.