In my AI Adoption Journey Post I mentioned the /grill-me skill by Matt Pocock. Being a big fan of it in the beginning, I kind of entered a through of disillusionment more and more. But Why?

Overgrilling leads to Premature Abstraction

More and more I ended up in situations where the grilling sessions seemed to never stop before answering around ~80 questions. Coming from a much more laid-back style of prompting, this initially seemed to be exactly what my agent driving projects needed and definitely improved my prompting in general.

What I actually found quite distracting was the fact, that the skill tries to walk you down the whole design tree of a problem, while I was rather trying to build small MVPs for quick feedback and iteration.

In addition to that, the grill-me skill often added new feature ideas to the thing I tried to build, which I actually liked but also led to distraction on the way to MVP. Not to mention that te skill also tried to add unnecessary hardening, e.g. thinking about complex deployment scenarios right from the first prompt, or already introducing an abstraction, multi-tenancy, or make things re-usable.

So when I lately attended a Hackathon, I reached a point where I realized I need some leaner version of this, to not spend the whole Hackathon answering questions but rather ship something.

Meet /lean-grilling

Rather then focussing on all aspects walking down a design tree, the lean-grill skill will ask you only the questions needed to unblock the next iteration of an idea.

Prototype Skill

When trying to describe an application UI, I find the /prototype skill quite useful in combination with lean-grilling. It will generate 3 (or more if you ask for it) versions of a user interface for your application, which you can quickly cycle through.

Once you decide vor a variant, this will implicitly answer questions you’d answer text based usually