---
title: "Grilling Doctrine"
description: "Relentless adversarial interview methodology to sharpen architecture and surface assumptions before coding."
section: "concepts"
type: "concept"
created: "2026-08-22"
updated: "2026-08-30"
confidence: "high"
tags: ["workflow", "agents", "principle"]
canonical: "https://pyweb.dev/wiki/grilling-doctrine"
---
# Grilling Doctrine

[matt pocock](/wiki/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](/wiki/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](/wiki/idea-to-ship-flow) and [grill with docs](/wiki/grill-with-docs) for the full pipeline.

## Related
[richard feynman](/wiki/richard-feynman), [feynman technique](/wiki/feynman-technique), [context engineering](/wiki/context-engineering), [idea to ship flow](/wiki/idea-to-ship-flow), [grill with docs](/wiki/grill-with-docs).

---

## Agent Navigation

cluster: person (170 pages) | betweenness: 255.9

### References (outbound)
- [Matt Pocock](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/matt-pocock.md)
- [Tracer Bullets](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/tracer-bullets.md)
- [Idea-to-Ship Flow](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/idea-to-ship-flow.md)
- [Richard Feynman](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/richard-feynman.md)

### Referenced by (inbound)
- [First-Principles Thinking](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/first-principles-thinking.md)
- [Five Debts of Agentic Engineering](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/five-debts-of-agentic-engineering.md)
- [Idea-to-Ship Flow](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/idea-to-ship-flow.md)
- [Karpathy's Four Guidelines](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/karpathy-four-guidelines.md)
- [Matt Pocock](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/matt-pocock.md)

### Evidence (verified primary sources)
- [matt-pocock-interviews-2023](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/raw/articles/matt-pocock-interviews-2023.md) | origin: https://www.thisdot.co/blog/get-100k-followers-by-teaching-typescript-with-matt-pocock-author-of-total | ingested: 2026-08-22 | sha256: e33c9d960a439d5ecc65c9176746311c61763108f2a4c5d4a06f1f8df748f5a4
- [aihero-dev-homepage-2026](https://pyweb.dev/wiki/raw/articles/aihero-dev-homepage-2026.md) | origin: https://www.aihero.dev/ | ingested: 2026-08-22 | sha256: 231157fed45f82922924a050e09b5b81a443891814fc1d72c874d864a6075419

### Machine endpoints
- Knowledge graph: https://pyweb.dev/api/graph.json
- Graph analysis: https://pyweb.dev/api/graph-analysis.json
- Context index: https://pyweb.dev/llms.txt