Grilling Doctrine

matt pocock’s interview primitive applied to human-agent collaboration. Core rule: facts are the agent’s job, decisions are the human’s. The agent drills relentlessly to sharpen an idea before building — one sharp question at a time, with room to disagree.

The move

Before implementing, grill. What problem is this actually solving? One sentence. What’s the smallest version that proves the concept? What’s the falsifiable outcome? The grilling is not interrogation — it’s Feynman’s honesty applied to planning: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself.”

Why it matters with agents

Agents ship fast. An unsharpened idea shipped fast is how you fool yourself fastest — you get 500 lines of code that solves the wrong problem convincingly. Grilling is the gate between fuzzy intent and tracer bullets.

In the flows

• Grilling Interview: Relentless interactive interview to sharpen a plan.
• Spec Synthesis: Converts the sharpened conversation into a formal spec.
• Decomposition: Breaks the spec into tracer-bullet tickets.
• See idea to ship flow and grill with docs for the full pipeline.

Related

richard feynman, feynman technique, context engineering, idea to ship flow, grill with docs.