The Grilling Pattern: A Clarification Step to Prevent Costly Requirement Misreads

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Vague requirements like 'improve the approval overview' can hide critical unanswered questions about scope, architecture, and intended behaviour. The Grilling Pattern is a structured but lightweight clarification step taken before an implementation plan is finalised, designed to surface only those ambiguities whose different answers would materially change the outcome. It is especially relevant in agentic development, where AI agents can rapidly translate an unclear request into a technically plausible but functionally wrong solution. The approach draws context from Lutions, a web application developed using a partly AI-agent-assisted workflow where humans handle product decisions and agents handle analysis, implementation, and verification. Rather than replacing full requirements engineering, the pattern acts as a targeted risk filter to make hidden assumptions visible while they are still easy to correct.

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