skills.sh #2 · 1.1M installs · we ran it ourselves
I asked AI for a company YouTube plan. It sent back five questions instead of a draft
Marketing got handed the company YouTube channel, and the plan is due next week. Ask AI to “draft the plan” and an 11-section draft shows up in two minutes. It assumes the goal is “awareness” and fills in budget and dates. I never decided any of that. So we ran the same sentence twice: once without the skill, once with it.
We’re starting an official company YouTube channel. I’m on the marketing team and it landed on me. Draft the plan.
Without the skill
The request as-is
I don’t know your company, industry, or product, so this is a general draft with stated assumptions. Tell me the five “to confirm” items below and I’ll tailor it.
0. Assumptions Target launch: December 2026 6. KPIs1,000 subscribers, 4,000 watch hours 7. Budget Gear ₩3–6M, outsourced editing ₩200–400K per video × 48 …
VS
/grill-me
Same sentence, /grill-me in front
No draft yet
If I draft now you’ll get a “YouTube channel plan template,” not something useful to your company. Let’s dig from the root.
❓ Q1 The channel’s purpose, and the definition of failure … What number, missing a year from now, would make you shut this project down? Subscriber count isn’t the answer.
❓ Q3 Real available resources … If the plan says “two uploads a week” and you have five hours a week on top of your job, that’s not a plan, that’s fiction.
❓ Q5 … Why YouTube, and why now? Did this come down from above, or did you decide from data?
VS
We ran this ourselves: a fresh Claude Code install (Opus), the same sentence, 16 September 2026. Left: with no company info it stated its assumptions and wrote a complete draft down to launch date and budget. Right: it refused to draft before hearing answers and asked five questions with its own recommendation on each. Quotes are verbatim (translated from Korean) with the middle trimmed.
With “ask me first” added
8 questions, things that have answers
1. What’s the company/product, B2B or B2C? 2. Pick one first-priority goal for the channel 3. Who’s the target viewer? 4. What resources can you actually use? 5. Existing channels or reusable assets 6. Reporting date and success criteria 7. Channels to benchmark / tone to avoid 8. Constraints
/grill-me
5 questions, things not yet decided
Q1 The channel’s purpose, and the definition of failure Q2 What the company sells, who watches Q3 Real available resources (in numbers) Q4 The on-camera problem Q5 Existing assets, and why this landed now
➡️ Each question comes with a recommended answer, and it won’t move to the next round until you answer.
Add “ask me first if you need anything” and AI does ask: what the company is, what the budget is. Fill those in and the draft is complete. This skill asks something else: when you’d pull the plug, why now, how many hours a week you can really give. Both sides asked you to pick a goal. Only the right side asked about the kill criteria and why now.
Fill in the blanks and the draft is done. The kill criteria and the “why now” aren’t blanks, so unless someone asks, they never make it into the draft. This skill makes you answer them before writing, and attaches its own recommendation to each.
Turn this skill on, and it makes you answer when you’d pull the plug before it writes a word.
One line installs both
grill-me alone does nothing. The install line below includes grilling, which it depends on. Paste the prompt into Claude Code or Cursor and the AI installs it.
1
Paste this into your AI, word for word
Install the grill-me and grilling skills from the mattpocock/skills repo into this project. The command is: npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill grill-me --skill grilling. When it’s done, confirm I can call /grill-me in a new chat.
If you’re comfortable in a terminal, it’s this one line.
In a new chat, put /grill-me in front of the blurry idea
Each question comes with a recommended answer. Don’t just accept them; answer one by one. It drafts once the questions run out.
/grill-me We’re starting an official company YouTube channel. I’m on the marketing team and it landed on me. Draft the plan.
It installs into the project folder you have open. If /grill-me doesn’t show up in a new chat, check you opened it from that folder. The full set (npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills) pulls in twenty-plus skills. Just these two.
In three lines
Use it when
You’re about to hand AI something still blurry: a plan, a business case, a new feature. No code needed. If you can already write it precisely, you don’t need this skill.
What’s inside
Each round it throws every question it can ask right now, with a recommended answer on each. In our run, round one was 5 questions. Answer, and the next round comes; it only drafts once the questions run out. The official FAQ treats 46 questions in 4 rounds as a normal session.
What it won’t do
Installing grill-me alone does nothing. It’s a one-line file that calls grilling, so you need both. It doesn’t trigger on its own; call it with /grill-me. Decisions don’t get written to a file, only to the chat. If you just agree with every recommendation, you’re rubber-stamping the AI’s plan.
What people actually said
We didn’t cherry-pick the nice ones. Three that helped, three that stung — moved over as written.
The helpful side
“Forty-five minutes later… You haven’t written a single line of code. But you’ve designed a much better product.” medium.com
— Tattva Tarang, Medium
“My packaging session ran fifty-one minutes. I have never once regretted the hour. I have regretted every skill I shipped without it.” mejba.me
— Engr Mejba Ahmed
“Thanks to v1.2’s round questions, the slow drip of easy yeses at the end is gone.” blog.alexrusin.com
— Alex Rusin
The disappointing side
“Now I see a dozen of questions, each answer is buried in a sentence. Answering them is a nightmare.” github.com
— ecc-parity-check
“Codex just asked me 200 questions. I never did [ask it to stop], I kept thinking maybe this one’s the last question.” github.com
— DoozyDoz
“It produces excellent structured decisions, but writes nothing permanent. When the session ends, those decisions exist only in conversation context.” github.com
— itsfordanny
What we saw when we ran it
Same sentence, three ways: as-is, with “ask me first if you need anything” added, and with /grill-me in front. Fresh Claude Code install (Opus), 16 September 2026.
01
Without the skill, and with no company info, it stated assumptions and wrote a complete draft: first upload December 2026, gear ₩3–6M, 1,000 subscribers at six months. For a subscription-pricing plan it set ₩9,900/month and ₩19,900 per seat. Both marked as assumptions, and a draft with assumed numbers is useful in itself. The decisions behind those numbers, why do this and when to stop, were just made for you.
02
Add “ask me first” and you get 8 questions: company, goal, target, resources, assets, reporting date, benchmarks, constraints. All things with answers. When to shut it down and why now weren’t there.
03
/grill-me asked 5 questions and wrote no draft before answers. We didn’t answer, so we never saw round two. Reviews mention sessions that reached 200 questions.
04
The subscription-pricing scene went the same way. Without the skill, a price table came first; /grill-me asked “one primary goal only,” “individual or team billing,” and “who reads this document” first.