Matt Pocock / grill-me
What if the agent asked you the hard questions instead?
The plan you cannot defend out loud is the plan that will fail in week three.
What to remember
- Being questioned surfaces gaps faster than being advised.
- Answers you invent under pressure are the ones to double check afterwards.
- It pairs with brainstorming and writing-plans, which sit on either side of it.
- It cannot supply domain knowledge you do not have. It only finds where it is missing.
01What it changes in practice
Most plans fail on the parts nobody wanted to discuss: migration, error paths, who owns the data, what happens to existing customers. Those are exactly the parts a friendly review skips.
An interrogation surfaces them because it keeps pulling on branches rather than approving the shape. The discomfort is the mechanism, not a side effect.
02Where it disappoints
It can grind. Not every branch deserves resolution before implementation, and deferring some deliberately is a legitimate answer that you have to give explicitly.
It also cannot check facts about your organisation. It will accept a confident answer that happens to be wrong.
Install and first run
- Install it with the skills CLI from mattpocock/skills, published under MIT.
- Bring a real plan, not a topic. It interrogates decisions, not intentions.
- Write down every answer you had to invent on the spot. Those are the actual gaps.
Questions people actually ask
- How is this different from asking for a review?
- A review evaluates what you wrote. This questions you until the undecided parts of the plan are visible.
- When should I use it?
- Before implementation, on anything where a wrong decision is expensive to reverse.
- Does it need a written plan?
- Yes, bring a real plan. A topic produces vague questions and vague answers.
Sources
Machine readable versions of this page