Matt Pocock

This is really excellent stuff, and way better than it needs to be

Worth a watch

Can I get someone at Anthropic to bump their cached version of mattpocock/skills?

Seems like someone needs to manually update my plugin version. All my users are stuck on v1.2.

Also, maybe we can make this process more automatic while we're at it

github.com/anthropics/cla…

Should you /grill-with-docs, /wayfinder, or just one shot the code?

1. If the diff is tiny, DON'T grill

/grill-with-docs saves you from situations where the agent built the wrong thing. But if the thing it's building is tiny, that cost drops to nothing. So one-shotting is absolutely fine when you're only making small changes.

2. Never start with /wayfinder

A failure mode of /wayfinder is that you start grilling and the solution turns out to be way simpler than you thought. Why is this bad? Because you've created the map and tickets, and you realise you don't need them.

So if the expected diff is medium-large, always start with a /grill-with-docs session. Then, if planning starts to get out of hand, just say "/wayfinder let's turn this into a map".

"Models are getting better, we don't need skills!"

What if I told you that models are also getting better at using skills?

Good skills tell the model what you care about, then stay out of its way.

Prompt of the day:

/wait-what questions did you have for me

Great for when the agent has gone off on its own for hours and has random questions scattered through its context window.

I've worked with Vojta for four years

He builds most of the code for my course sites, including:

aihero.dev
totaltypescript.com
aicodingdictionary.com

He knows a thing or two about frontend design

And guess what, his skills are 🔥

Today's hot take:

Agents are actually really good at strategic programming

It's just they aren't RL'd to actually care about it

"Just do the task at hand, don't do anything else"

So all you need to do is to tell your agent to care about its own codebase.

But the truth is that most people actually don't care that much about the codebase, as long as the code works.

This needs to change. Care about the code, and tell your agent to.

Starting to realise that to make agents strategic, they really just need a clear goal.

I.e. they can hill climb anything (as long as they have the data), but they need to know where they're going.

Feels like I need to make a /the-ideal-codebase skill that helps you define what that goal should be.

Then you can let your agent choose the direction and just try to endlessly improve.

1. Oh shit, AI can do my job better than me
2. Software engineering is dead!
3. I can vibe code as much slop as I want!
4. Oh, things are not going well. Fable/Sol/Opus all suuuck
5. But what if I constrain the agent? Put it in a straitjacket?
6. Oh, the results are pretty good now. How do I go deeper?
7. *Orders 12 software engineering books from Amazon*
8. Software engineering is alive!

Probably nothing

Prompt of the day:

/writing-for-agents my AGENTS.md is a hot mess, propose a series of restructurings that:

- Remove no-ops
- Use progressive disclosure
- Move instructions to CODING_STANDARDS.md

Apply your work over three subagents, each more radical than the last. Create a single PR.

AGENTS.md is the most common source of token inefficiency. This prompt kills it dead.

IMO you should be specializing my skills to your work

I.e. you should extend /grill-me to make sure it:

1. Holds you to a high standard of product design
2. Does a survey about security implications
3. Uses /show-me to preview the code for you

a chat with @mattpocockuk about building reliable software factries and where to start

Thanks for 400K on YouTube pals 👌

Got recognised at my kids' local park the other day, things are getting mad

Having shipped the AI Coding Crash Course (largely for beginners/intermediates) means that the upcoming Cohort will be really quite advanced/in-depth

Just recorded an 11-minute /grill-with-docs session about DDD, scenario testing, and sharpening language.

It's so good

Prompt of the day:

/retro take a look at as many GitHub PR review comments as you have access to from my team. Create suggestions for updates to CODING_STANDARDS.md (breaking into multiple files as needed).

Makes your PR comments inform the code going forward.

mattpocock/skills v1.3 is out!

- /pr (new) writes easy-to-read PR bodies, showing hard evidence that the changes work and assessing merge risk
- /implement-spec (new) takes in a spec and tickets, and implements them with subagents
- CONTEXT.md renamed to GLOSSARY.md
- /retro (new) reviews recent coding agent sessions and suggests repo improvements

/retro, especially, feels like a huge upgrade. Enjoy!

everything i know about managing agents i learned from the amazing programmers and computer scientists that came before

constraints in your codebase are freeing for both humans and agents! this has always been true, but if you were a small dev team you likely never had to think that deeply because you could trust your fellow programmers to write code and review well

but large companies have had to solve this problem since even before agents. because before you had agent slop, you had human slop. lots of engineers wrote bad code out of necessity (eg backend engineer forced to write frontend or reverse). the solution to this was constraints: lint rules, smarter compilers and diagnostics, high quality tests, investments into observability, and so on

the arrival of agents just means that big company problems are now everyone's problems. the good news is that none of this is really that novel: it's just good engineering

youtube.com/watch?v=GqmsQe…

Oh shit I just realised

that grilling

is where the meat and the metal interact