1. Overview — what the grill skills are for

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What the skills do

• Grill Me and Grill with Docs are used worldwide as a replacement for plan mode in agents (0:00).
• Their design intent: relentlessly question you until you and the agent reach a shared understanding of the thing to be built (0:00).
• Common complaint the author winces at: "Codex just asked me 200 questions" — treated as a symptom of misuse, not a bug in the skill (0:00).

Why the failure modes are user-side

• The skills' quality depends on the skill of the person answering (0:25).
• To use them well, you must be good at planning, which means you need:
  • an understanding of scope (0:25);
  • a sense of what level of fidelity a given question requires to be answered (0:25).
• The skills themselves are short files — they are designed to aid an engineer, not replace one (0:25).

Structure of the video

• Nine things people get wrong, but framed first through a set of lenses for understanding the failure modes — without the right framing you cannot change the behaviour (0:53).

The lenses that follow:

Lens	Failure it explains
Question fidelity	Trying to answer ungrillable questions in a grilling session
Scope	Hidden high-fidelity questions + hitting the model's dumb zone
Active vs passive	540-question interviews, or endless grilling instead of coding
Context value	Throwing away the session's design decisions
Model choice	Using a model too weak for parametric-knowledge work
Parallelism	Leaving throughput on the table