grilling: round asked while exploration runs gets rewritten when it reports #1245

Before filing

• I've read SCOPE.md and checked .out-of-scope/, and this isn't covered by either.

Skill

grilling

What went wrong

Harness: Claude Code 2.1.280, plugin install. Model: claude-fable-5-1.

I ran /grill-me on porting one internal toolkit into another. The agent sent three survey sub-agents to read the repos, then asked Round 1 (Q1–Q9) straight away, following line 28 of SKILL.md: "Don't block on it: a running exploration is an unsettled prerequisite, so only the questions downstream of it wait for the sub-agent to report; ask the rest of the frontier now."

Before I could answer, the first survey came back and the agent wrote: "It reshapes two Round-1 questions before you answer". One question was "largely settled by the existing design", another's subject became "a deletion candidate", and a third was deferred to the next round. When the remaining surveys were in, it added Q10–Q17 as "newly unblocked questions — answer them together with Round 1". This has happened in more than one session.

In practice that was one round delivered in three pieces, with edits in between. I read questions that were about to be withdrawn, and the agent had to issue edits to a round that was still open.

The cause is the rule itself. "Only the questions downstream of it wait" asks the agent to judge, before the facts arrive, which questions those facts will touch. It can't know that, and it consistently guesses "independent". The facts usually reshape the frontier itself, not just the questions it marked as downstream.

Proposed change

In the "Finding facts" paragraph, replace the "Don't block on it: ..." sentence with:

A running exploration is an unsettled prerequisite of the whole round: which questions its findings reshape is unknown until they arrive, so ask the round once every exploration has reported.

This reverses the "research never blocks the round" choice from the round-by-round frontier rework. Trade-off: the user waits for the exploration before the first round. In exchange, every round they get is final.

The docs page for grilling would need re-syncing to match.