I Stopped Using /grill-me for Coding. Here's What I Use Instead — Deep Dive

The Phenomenon of Grill Me ▶ 0:00

Matt wrote 4 sentences that became the most influential he's ever written — the Grill Me skill. It interviews you relentlessly until reaching shared understanding, walking down each branch of the design tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one by one. He receives ~5 messages daily from people praising it.

"Absolute game-changer" · "Goated" · "Might save time — you just one-shot everything after gathering context."

Where Grill Me Falls Short ▶ 1:03

Despite the praise, Matt found recurring problems:

• The agent would be verbose about concepts that already had established terms
• He'd have to remind it "there's already a term for that"
• When they did land on good shared language, it wasn't documented anywhere
• He had to re-explain all non-obvious things about the codebase and domain before every productive session
• Domain jargon (e.g., "standalone video" = a video with lessonId === null) wasn't captured

Core frustration: communication was effective, but lacked persistent shared vocabulary.

Ubiquitous Language — The Missing Piece ▶ 3:30

Inspired by Domain-Driven Design (Eric Evans' "Big Blue Book"), Matt created a ubiquitous language skill. The concept: code, developers, and domain experts should all use a shared language documented in a single source of truth.

He started using it alongside Grill Me — calling the ubiquitous language skill mid-session to sharpen terms and create a context.md file. Then realized: why not combine both into one skill?

Grill with Docs — The New Skill ▶ 4:41

Grill with Docs = Grill Me + Ubiquitous Language + ADRs, combined into one skill.

Three Layers

1. context.md — Documents all shared language (glossary of domain terms). Uses DDD's concept of bounded contexts. One context.md per bounded context; scales to monorepos with a context map.
2. Grill session enhancements — Challenges language usage against the existing glossary, sharpens fuzzy language, discusses concrete scenarios, cross-references with code, and updates context.md as you go.
3. Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) — Simple markdown files documenting non-obvious decisions. Created only when a decision is: hard to reverse, surprising without context, and the result of a real trade-off.

Live Demo — Grilling in Action ▶ 8:28

Matt demos adding a "pitch" entity to his app (courses/lessons/videos platform). The pitch concept: Mr. Beast-style packaging — create the video title/description/framing before the actual content.

What Happens During the Session

• Agent immediately reads context.md, finds "standalone video" already defined
• Surfaces a terminology tension: cardinality between pitch and standalone video (one-to-many)
• Detects a terminology collision: standalone videos can now be either pitched or unpitched
• Forces a design decision: keep "standalone video" as any lessonless video, or redefine to mean specifically unpitched
• This language decision cascades into UI sections, code structure, deletion cascades, variable names

"This might seem like bike-shedding, but this language affects every variable name, every file name in the generated code."

The context.md Updates ▶ 11:14

After the grilling session, Claude updates context.md with new entries:

• Pitch — the entity itself
• Pitch status — idle / scheduled / shipped
• Pitched standalone video
• Unattached standalone video

The language becomes precise and persistent across all future sessions.

Benefits of Grill with Docs ▶ 12:25

Three concrete benefits:

1. Concise replies — AI uses fewer tokens because shared vocabulary eliminates verbose re-descriptions
2. Aligned thinking traces — AI's internal reasoning uses the same language, so fewer tokens spent thinking = more aligned with your intention
3. Easier to navigate code — Code mirrors the documented language, making search and navigation natural

"These are the same benefits described in Domain-Driven Design. The same techniques that work with humans also work with AI."

When to Use Which Skill ▶ 13:27

• Grill with Docs — when you have a codebase (even a new one — especially at project start when establishing shared language)
• Grill Me — when you don't have a codebase (productivity, writing, planning). Moved to the "productivity" area.

Amazing non-coding use case: someone wrote a eulogy using Grill Me to surface stories about their mom.

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