Grill To Goal

grill-to-goal is an agent skill, inspired by Matt Pocock's agent skills, for turning a vague product or engineering idea into an implementation-ready plan.

Use it before implementation when you want the agent to read the project, challenge unresolved decisions, capture durable choices, and finish with clear acceptance criteria.

Quick Example

Use /grill-to-goal to plan out my feature, focusing on the data model, user
workflow, and rollout risks.

The skill should ground itself in the project, ask sharper questions with recommended answers, and produce a plan with scope, milestones, verification commands, and acceptance criteria.

Install

Clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/matthewschrager/skills.git
cd skills

Install the skill into your agent's local skills directory:

scripts/install.sh --target codex

When the installer offers to add Matt Pocock's skills, prefer installing them. grill-to-goal works best when those skills are available.

Supported targets:

Target	Installs to
agents	$HOME/.agents/skills
claude	$HOME/.claude/skills
codex	$HOME/.codex/skills
cursor	$HOME/.cursor/skills-cursor

Install to multiple targets:

scripts/install.sh --target claude,codex,cursor

Install to a custom skills directory:

scripts/install.sh --target-dir "$HOME/.some-agent/skills"

If the destination already exists, replace it with:

scripts/install.sh --target codex --force

Preview the install without writing files:

scripts/install.sh --target codex --dry-run

Restart or reload your agent if it does not discover newly installed skills automatically.

For agents without a named installer target, copy the full skills/grill-to-goal directory into the agent's skills directory. Keep SKILL.md, references/, and vendor/ together.

Use

Ask your agent to use the skill before it starts building:

Use grill-to-goal to stress-test this feature idea and turn it into an
implementation-ready plan.

The skill should produce a plan, not code. A good result includes:

• confirmed project context;
• unresolved design questions with recommended answers;
• durable decisions captured in docs when appropriate;
• scope and non-scope;
• implementation milestones;
• exact test or verification commands;
• acceptance criteria clear enough for another agent or developer to execute.

Preferred Companion Skills

This skill extends Matt Pocock's grill-with-docs workflow. When your agent runtime can use Matt Pocock's skills, prefer installing them.

When installed, grill-to-goal uses grill-with-docs as the preferred session pattern and domain-modeling for context docs, glossary work, and ADR capture. Otherwise it follows its built-in workflow and uses the vendored domain-modeling fallback included in this repo so planning is not blocked.

Install the preferred skills with:

npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

License

MIT. See LICENSE.