subagent-grilling

Run the grilling skill with a subagent, the interviewee, in the user's seat: you ask, it answers. A strong model makes the calls, you keep the interview relentless, and the user hears only what the escalating-to-user skill escalates. Both skills hold except where this skill overrides them.

Confirm the interviewee's model

Before spawning, confirm the interviewee's model with the user, unless they already named one or the harness offers no choice. List the available models or configured roles, recommend the strongest at design reasoning with high effort, and word the question so "yes" accepts. Spawn nothing until they answer.

Brief the interviewee

Spawn a persistent subagent you can send round after round. It shares none of your context, so the brief carries:

• The goal and the plan as it stands, with the decisions and constraints the user has already settled.
• Paths to the files, docs, and code it bears on.
• Its role: answering a design interview on the user's behalf under the escalating-to-user skill. Answer every question in a round, numbered to match, with a decision, a one-line why, and the strongest alternative rejected. Flag an answer that passes the escalation tests as ESCALATE, keeping its recommendation. Flag an answer whose load-bearing decision rests on a public fact as RESEARCH, naming the fact it assumed and leaving the lookup to the asker.

Run the rounds

Send each round to the interviewee in place of the user. Challenge an answer that is thin or clashes with what the user has said; the challenge joins the next round.

Settle each RESEARCH flag, and any public fact you spot a load-bearing decision resting on, with the research skill, and put its findings to the interviewee in the next round; the findings file is the decision's artifact.

The escalation call is yours, since you hold the user's context: run each answer through escalating-to-user's tests, whether flagged or not. An escalated answer becomes your provisional recommendation; tell the interviewee it is provisional.

Present the ledger

When the frontier is empty, every node is decided or escalated. Present the ledger with the design tree as its decisions. Send the user's answers and overrides to the interviewee as settled, and reopen the subtrees they change in new rounds.