Every lesson so far had you write down what you want. But sometimes you don't know yet. You have an idea ("a bot that reminds my team about birthdays") and a dozen decisions you haven't noticed you need to make.
Ask Claude to build it straight away and it fills each of those gaps with a guess. The result looks finished and is built on choices you never made.
The fix is to turn the prompt around: let Claude interview you first.
Matt Pocock calls this grilling. His "grill me" prompt is only a few lines long, and it went viral among people who build with AI. The shape is simple:
Claude asks one question at a time, so you can think about each one.
For each question, Claude recommends an answer, so you can often just say "yes" and keep moving.
It keeps going until the two of you agree on every decision, and only then writes the plan, spec or code.
promptI want a bot that reminds my team about birthdays.
Here's a Slack bot in Python that reads birthdays from a CSV and posts at 9am UTC every day…
First question: where should the reminders appear? I'd suggest your team's Slack channel, since that's where people already chat. Does that work, or somewhere else?
The left reply chose Slack, Python, a CSV and a time zone for you. The right one asked about the first of those, offered a sensible default, and waited.
You'll write this prompt often enough that it's worth saving. That's what a skill is: a saved prompt (a SKILL.md file) that Claude Code loads when its description matches what you're doing, or when you type its name, like /grill-me. Matt Pocock publishes his, MIT-licensed, in mattpocock/skills. The Work with coding agents course shows how to write your own.
Your turn. Write an interview-first prompt for the birthday bot. Ask Claude to ask one question at a time, to recommend an answer for each, and to wait before writing any plan or code. Run it and check that you get exactly one question back.
Goal Get one clear question back, with a recommended answer, and no plan or code yet
Run your prompt and the replies land here.