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Add Grill discovery-interview workflow to the ISA skill#1606

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asdf8675309:feat/isa-grill-workflow
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Add Grill discovery-interview workflow to the ISA skill#1606
asdf8675309 wants to merge 1 commit into
danielmiessler:mainfrom
asdf8675309:feat/isa-grill-workflow

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The gap

ISA already covers known-structure work — Scaffold, Interview, CheckCompleteness, Reconcile, Seed, Append. What's missing is the front end for when you don't know the shape yet. If an idea's still half-formed, you can't scaffold it honestly — you just bake in assumptions nobody checked. That's the most common way agentic work goes off the rails: the agent runs with the wrong mental model before you get a chance to correct it.

The change

A Grill workflow that interrogates a half-formed idea until its shape is clear, then hands it to Scaffold. Three pieces:

  • skills/ISA/Workflows/Grill.md — walks the design tree one question at a time, recommends an answer each turn, explores the codebase instead of asking when it can, and checkpoints every turn to MEMORY/WORK/{slug}/grill.md so a long session doesn't lose earlier answers to context drift. Runs a pre-mortem→draft-ISC pass, then hands off to Scaffold.
  • skills/ISA/SKILL.md — one new routing row ("grill me" / "discovery interview" / "figure out the shape"Workflows/Grill.md) and a Grill clause in the description.
  • commands/grill-me.md — a thin /grill-me <topic> command that routes into Skill("ISA", "grill me …"). Model-invocation is off, so it only fires when you ask.

Same split as the skill it's based on: a reusable interview loop plus a thin command to trigger it.

Why it's safe

  • Additive. One new workflow, one new command, one routing row, one description tweak. Nothing existing changes.
  • Fails safe. If Grill mis-routes it falls back to normal ISA behavior, and it never writes outside MEMORY/WORK/{slug}/grill.md — scratch output that sits next to where the ISA lands.
  • Human-gated. The command is disable-model-invocation; Grill runs only when you call it.

Verification

  • Running live in a real install: commands/grill-me.mdSkill("ISA", "grill me …") → the SKILL.md Grill row → Workflows/Grill.md, all resolve. The ISA skill validates — every routing row points at a real file, and the description is under the frontmatter cap.
  • The Grill → Scaffold handoff works end to end: the grill.md checkpoint feeds Skill("ISA","scaffold from <slug>/grill.md").

Scope

Additive. Workflows/Grill.md and commands/grill-me.md are new, plus two small edits to ISA/SKILL.md. No other skill, tool, or hook touched.

Credit

This adapts Matt Pocock's grilling / grill-me skills (github.com/mattpocock/skills — MIT, © 2026 Matt Pocock). His "grill me" prompt is the core idea: interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan; walk each branch of the design tree, resolving dependencies one at a time; recommend an answer per question; ask one at a time; explore the codebase instead of asking. This is an independent implementation wired into LifeOS's ISA discovery→scaffold pipeline — it checkpoints each turn to MEMORY/WORK/{slug}/grill.md instead of a project-root brainstorms/ folder, and adds a pre-mortem→draft-ISC pass before the Scaffold handoff.

Adds a Grill workflow: a relentless, checkpointed discovery interview that
discovers an ISA's shape before Scaffold builds it — distinct from Interview,
which fills a known ISA structure. Walks the design tree one question at a
time with a recommended answer per question, checkpoints every turn to
MEMORY/WORK/{slug}/grill.md, runs a pre-mortem pass to derive draft ISCs,
then hands off to Scaffold.

Adds skills/ISA/Workflows/Grill.md and commands/grill-me.md, and wires Grill
into ISA/SKILL.md's workflow routing table and description.

Adapted from Matt Pocock's grilling/grill-me skills
(github.com/mattpocock/skills, MIT) — independent implementation.

Co-authored-by: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
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