Matt Pocock Built the Skills Repo Every AI Coder Is Using

Link to Resources: https://thenextnewthing.ai/my-resources
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Andrew Warner sits down with Matt Pocock to learn how his popular AI skills help coding agents plan better, build more reliably, and improve their own workflows.

Matt’s Skills: https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/

Andrew Warner talks with Matt Pocock about the skills he uses to get better results from coding agents, including his popular Grill Me, Grill With Docs, To Spec, To Ticket, Implement, Code Review, Writing for Agents, and Teach skills. Matt explains why developers should align with an agent before building, how low-fidelity planning can prevent expensive mistakes, how specs and tickets allow large projects to span multiple context windows and agents, and how workflows can be automated with tools like Sandcastle. They also discuss pruning unnecessary instructions from skills, removing "no-ops," maintaining a shared vocabulary with agents, and using a stateful teaching skill that learns how you learn.

00:00 - Grill Me: Align with your coding agent before starting the work.
02:42 - Low-Fidelity Planning: Start simple before committing to a full implementation.
04:30 - Pre-Alignment: Catch requirements and design problems before they become expensive.
05:06 - Security Review: Compare a general Claude Code review with the Grill Me workflow.
05:42 - Grill Me Questions: Define the adversary, assets, scope, and deliverable before reviewing.
07:03 - Custom Skills: Why a small reusable skill can encode a process you repeat.
08:06 - Agent Alignment: Surface priorities and assumptions that the agent cannot infer on its own.
09:27 - Grill Me Skill: See how Matt's 22-line skill works behind the scenes.
12:45 - Skill Workflow: Start with Grill Me, then move from specs to tickets, implementation, and review.
15:09 - Shared Vocabulary: Use consistent terminology so agents understand your project more reliably.
16:48 - Implement & Review: Build, commit, and automatically review completed work.
17:24 - Specs & Tickets: Break large features into manageable pieces across multiple context windows.
18:18 - Multi-Agent Development: Assign tickets to different agents or Claude Code tabs.
19:30 - Sandcastle: Orchestrate agents by looping through tickets and clearing context between tasks.
21:54 - Writing for Agents: Improve the skills and instructions you give to AI agents.
22:30 - No-Ops: Remove instructions that don't actually change an agent's behavior.
24:00 - Skill Pruning: Keep each meaning in one place and eliminate unnecessary instructions.
25:21 - Automatic Skill Editing: Invoke skill-pruning workflows when creating or modifying agent instructions.
25:48 - Teach: Create a stateful AI teacher that remembers how you learn and builds lessons around you.
27:36 - Primary Sources: Have the teaching skill research and learn from original source material.

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