grill-me-codex

Two AI models harden your plan before you write a line of code. A family of Claude Code skills that close the two gaps in AI-assisted coding: the gap between you and Claude (do we agree on what to build?) and the gap between Claude and the quality of what it produces (is the plan actually correct — and how would you even know?).

Act 1 grills you to lock the plan. Act 2 hands that plan to OpenAI Codex — a rival, cross-provider model — which adversarially tears it apart over several rounds until both models sign off. Only then does code get written.

Why a second model? Because the same model that plans the build and writes the build can't be trusted to grade its own work — it's an echo chamber. A different provider catches what Claude structurally can't see in itself.

Built on Matt Pocock's grill-me / grill-with-docs skills (MIT) — Act 1 is his work; the iterative cross-model Codex review (Act 2) is the addition.

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The skills

Skill	Act 1	Act 2	Use when
grill-me-codex	Claude interrogates you one question at a time until the decision tree is resolved	Codex adversarial review loop	Planning from scratch + want alignment AND a second-model check
grill-with-docs-codex	Same, but challenges your plan against your project's CONTEXT.md glossary + writes ADRs inline	Codex review loop	Same, in a project with established terminology / architecture decisions
codex-review	— (you already have a plan)	Codex review loop	You have a plan and just want the cross-model stress-test

How Act 2 works

1. Claude writes the locked plan to PLAN.md and starts a log at PLAN-REVIEW-LOG.md.
2. Round 1: Codex reviews the plan in a read-only sandbox and returns VERDICT: APPROVED or VERDICT: REVISE.
3. Rounds 2..N: Claude revises; the same Codex session is resumed so it remembers its prior critiques and only checks whether they're addressed.
4. Bounded by MAX_ROUNDS (default 5). Terminates on APPROVED or the cap (a flagged deadlock beats a fake "approved").
5. You gate twice only: kickoff, and final sign-off before any code. Codex is read-only every round and never writes a file.

Two artifacts: PLAN.md (the clean final plan — the what) and PLAN-REVIEW-LOG.md (the full round-by-round argument — the why).

Install

Copy the skill folders into your Claude Code skills directory:

# macOS / Linux
cp -r skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

# Windows (PowerShell)
Copy-Item -Recurse skills\* $env:USERPROFILE\.claude\skills\

Then invoke in Claude Code: /grill-me-codex, /grill-with-docs-codex, or /codex-review.

Prerequisites

• Codex CLI ≥ 0.130 — npm install -g @openai/codex@latest (older versions error on the default gpt-5.5 model).
• Authenticated Codex — run codex login once (a ChatGPT account works; Free/Plus/Pro/Max all fine).
• Don't pin a model — ChatGPT-account auth rejects gpt-5.x-codex model variants; the skills use your config default.

Tunables

Var	Default	Meaning
MAX_ROUNDS	5	Hard cap on review rounds
PLAN_FILE	PLAN.md	Where the plan lives
LOG_FILE	PLAN-REVIEW-LOG.md	The argument transcript

Pass e.g. rounds=3 when invoking to override.

Safety

Codex runs read-only every round — -s read-only on the first call, -c sandbox_mode="read-only" on every resume (the resume subcommand doesn't accept -s, and without forcing read-only it would inherit your config.toml sandbox default, which may be danger-full-access). The skills handle this for you. No code is ever written until you approve the final plan.

Credits

• Act 1 (grill-me, grill-with-docs) © Matt Pocock — https://github.com/mattpocock/skills (MIT). See each skill's THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.
• Act 2 (iterative Codex review) and packaging by Chase AI. Go deeper in Chase AI+ (Claude Code Masterclass).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.