---
title: "Grilling my own essay"
author: "Stan Voo"
url: https://www.99rabbits.com/blog/grilling-my-own-essay
published: 2026-06-03
updated: 2026-10-14
summary: "Pointed a skill built to sharpen plans and designs at a finished observational essay. It tripped on the genre once, re-grounded, then sharpened the prose cleanly."
---

# Grilling my own essay

Matt Pocock's [/grill-me](https://www.aihero.dev/skills-grill-me) is "a relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design" before you commit to it. When I ran it in June, it asked one contestable question at a time, until the design was sharp. I pointed it at a finished 99rabbits essay instead. It surprisingly worked.

The essay was about two patterns of how AI agents join human conversations — interceptors and demons. One question got the genre wrong, in a way that's worth writing down.

## Q1 — what is the actual thesis?

The first question was: which single sentence would a reader quote afterwards and say *this is what the post argued*? It listed five candidates from the draft, ranked them, recommended the strongest one, and asked me to either endorse it or name a sixth.

My answer was that none of them was the thesis, because the piece doesn't have one. It's observational. It's not arguing for a prediction or prescribing a behavior. It's saying: here are two structurally different patterns, here's how to tell them apart, here are the consequences each one carries. The contribution is the distinction itself, not a claim about which side wins.

The skill accepted that immediately and re-grounded:

> Observational essays are a legitimate form: they don't argue, they distinguish. The contribution is the distinction itself. Think Christopher Alexander on patterns, or any good taxonomy essay — before this, you couldn't cleanly separate X from Y; after, you can.

Then it asked a different question, scoped to the new genre: does the opening deliver the distinction sharply enough? Which is the right question for an observational essay and the wrong one for an argumentative one.

## Q2 through Q4 — once the genre was right

Once the skill knew it was grilling an observational essay, the rest landed cleanly.

Q2. Second paragraph said *"two structurally different patterns are in play, and I suspect that difference is worth thinking about."* The skill called out — correctly — that "worth thinking about" is doing none of the work. It offered three sharper openings, each with a different promise to the reader: clarity, recognition, design leverage. I picked.

Q3 was visual symmetry. The Pattern B section had a diagram and a screenshot. The Pattern A section had nothing. The skill named both the case for leaving it (form matches content — Pattern A is invisible) and the case for fixing it, and recommended fixing. I agreed. Inserted the diagram.

Q4 raised the strongest counter-objection a sharp reader would make; I judged the existing essay already defused it and overruled. Fine — the skill surfaces contestable choices, it doesn't make them.

## The skill held up

Three questions produced direct edits, one I overruled. The first cost a cycle to genre-correct, then re-routed. For finished prose, treat the first question or two as orientation — the grilling tightens once the skill knows what it's grilling.

If you write nonfiction prose, try `/grill-me` at your next finished draft. Tell it the genre first; the rest ports cleanly.