Published: 2026-06-04

The ‘Grill Me’ Skill That Extracts Knowledge for Better Claude Code Projects

Chapters / key moments (click to jump — plays here on the page)

Nate Herk showcases the "Grill Me" Claude Code skill — originally by Matt PCO, extended by Nate with automatic checkpointing. It relentlessly interviews you about a project, process, or topic until it has a thorough shared understanding with no knowledge gaps. The extracted knowledge is saved to a /brainstorms/ markdown file after every question, so nothing is lost even in long sessions. The goal: jump to 90% accuracy on the first iteration of a skill or CLAUDE.md file, rather than spending 20+ iterations slowly improving.

Source video

"The Skill That 10x’d My Claude Code Projects" by Nate Herk — Watch on YouTube →

Key Takeaways

The "Grill Me" skill relentlessly asks questions about a topic — one at a time — until it reaches a complete shared understanding with no gaps. It will ask 5 questions or 30, whatever it takes.
After every answer, it checkpoints progress to a brainstorm markdown file in a /brainstorms/ folder at your project root, preventing context loss if the session runs long.
At the end of a session, Grill Me identifies gaps in your existing skills or CLAUDE.md and offers to update them — closing the loop between knowledge extraction and usable context.
The skill is intentionally simple: a 4–5 sentence prompt. A Claude Code skill doesn't have to be a complex automation — it can just be a prompt you don't want to type manually every time.
Invoke it with /grill-me or plain English: "Grill me about [topic]." It loads the skill, creates a capture file, and starts the interview.
Use it before building any new skill, CLAUDE.md file, or system context to front-load knowledge extraction rather than iterating from failure.

Core Grill Me Skill Prompt (from video)

Interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until we reach
a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the design tree,
resolving dependencies between decisions one by one. For each question,
provide your recommended answer. Ask questions one at a time. If a
question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase
instead.

Nate's extended version adds automatic checkpointing: after every answer, the skill writes the Q&A log, key decisions, and open flags to a timestamped file in /brainstorms/. Get the original from Matt PCO or Nate's free School community (link in the video description).

Commands & Code Mentioned

/grill-me
# or invoke naturally:
# "Grill me about [the topic or process you want to capture]"