Ask Matt

Before repository-facing work, read ../../WORK-ROUTING.md. It is the shared routing source for project documents, lane selection, plan ownership, and closeout.

Ask Matt

You don't remember every skill, so ask.

A flow is a path through the skills. Most paths run along one main flow, and two on-ramps merge onto it. Everything else is standalone, or a vocabulary layer that runs underneath.

The main flow: idea → ship

The route most work travels. You have an idea and want it built.

1. /grill-with-docs — sharpen the idea by interview. Start here whenever you are working in a working directory: it's stateful, retaining what it learns in CONTEXT.md and ADRs. (No working directory? Use /grill-me — see Standalone. Both run the same /grilling primitive; grill-with-docs is the one that leaves a paper trail, which makes it the better of the two whenever a repo is there to leave it in.)

2. Branch — can you settle every question in conversation? If a question needs a runnable answer (state, business logic, a UI you have to see), detour through a prototype, bridged by /handoff in both directions (a prototype lives in its own directory, which is exactly what /handoff is for — see Phase boundaries):

   • /handoff out, then open a fresh session against that file,
   • /prototype to answer the question with throwaway code,
   • /handoff back what you learned, and reference it from the original idea thread.

3. Branch — is this a multi-session build?

   • Yes → /to-spec (turn the thread into a spec), then /to-tickets to split it into tracer-bullet tickets, each declaring its blocking edges. On a local tracker that's one file per ticket under .scratch/<feature>/issues/, worked blockers-first by hand; on a real tracker the edges become native blocking links, so any ticket whose blockers are done can be grabbed — kick off /implement per ticket, /clearing context between each one. Each ticket is self-contained, so the last one's context is disposable.
   • No → /implement right here, in the same context window.

   Either way, /implement builds each issue by driving /tdd internally — one red-green slice at a time — then closes out by running /code-review, a two-axis review (Standards + Spec) of the diff, before committing. Reach for /tdd on its own when you just want to build a concrete behaviour test-first without a full spec, and /code-review on its own whenever you want to review a branch or PR against a fixed point.

Context hygiene

Keep steps 1–3 in one unbroken context window — don't compact or clear until after /to-tickets — so the grilling, spec, and tickets all build on the same thinking. Each /implement then starts fresh, working from the ticket.

The limit on this is the smart zone: the window (~150k tokens on state-of-the-art models) within which the model still reasons sharply. If a session approaches it before /to-tickets, don't push on degraded — /compact at the nearest phase boundary and carry on (see Phase boundaries).

On-ramps

A starting situation that generates work, then merges onto the main flow.

• Bugs and requests piling up → /triage. It moves issues through triage roles and produces agent-ready issues, which /implement later picks up.

  Triage is only for issues you didn't create — bug reports, incoming feature requests, anything that arrives raw. Tickets that /to-tickets produced are already agent-ready, so don't triage them.

• Something's broken → /diagnosing-bugs. For the hard ones: the bug that resists a first glance, the intermittent flake, the regression that crept in between two known-good states. It refuses to theorise until it has a tight feedback loop — one command that already goes red on this bug — then fixes with a regression test. Its post-mortem hands off to /improve-codebase-architecture when the real finding is that there's no good seam to lock the bug down.

• A huge, foggy effort — a greenfield project or a huge feature build, too big for one session → /wayfinder, the most cognitively demanding flow here. When the way from here to the destination isn't visible yet, it charts a shared map of decision tickets on the issue tracker and resolves them one at a time — producing decisions, not deliverables — until the fog is pushed back and the way is clear. Where /grill-with-docs sharpens an idea you can hold in one session, wayfinder is for the idea you can't — and it's slower and denser, so save it for exactly that, never a well-scoped feature.

  When the map clears, it hands off, it doesn't build: merge onto the main flow at /to-spec, which collapses the map's linked decisions into a buildable plan, then /to-tickets and /implement as usual. Looping the map straight into /implement skips that collapse and throws the linked detail away — go straight to /implement only when the effort turned out genuinely small.

Codebase health

Not feature work — upkeep.

• /improve-codebase-architecture — run whenever you have a spare moment to keep the codebase good for agents to operate in. It surfaces deepening opportunities; picking one generates an idea you can take into the main flow at /grill-with-docs. It's the survey that finds the candidates; /codebase-design (below) is the bench you design the chosen one on.

Vocabulary underneath

Two model-invoked references that run beneath the other skills — each the single source of truth for its vocabulary. Reach for them directly when the words, not the process, are the problem; or let the skills above pull them in.

• /domain-modeling — sharpen the project's domain language: challenge a fuzzy term, resolve an overloaded word ("account" doing three jobs), record a hard-to-reverse decision as an ADR. It's the active discipline /grill-with-docs drives to keep CONTEXT.md a clean glossary.
• /codebase-design — the deep-module vocabulary (module, interface, depth, seam, adapter, leverage, locality) for designing a module's shape: a lot of behaviour behind a small interface at a clean seam. /tdd and /improve-codebase-architecture both speak it.

Phase boundaries

A phase is a chunk of work inside a session — the grilling, the implementation, the QA. At the boundary between two of them you have five options, and picking between them is the fuzziest decision in this whole map:

• Continue — stay put. Costs nothing, loses nothing.
• /clear — empty the window, when nothing here matters to what's next.
• /handoff — write a portable markdown file. Narrow: only for a new harness, a new directory, a colleague, or forking a side task mid-phase. What it buys is portability.
• Subagent — send a tightly-scoped task to its own window and get a report back.
• /compact — compress this context and seed a fresh session with it. The default, at the bottom of the tree rather than the first reach.

Read PHASE-BOUNDARIES.md for the ordered tree — the five questions, the reasoning behind each branch, and why the primary-source cost makes Continue the one to rule out first. Make the decision at a boundary; mid-phase, continue or split the rest into subagents.

Standalone

Off the main flow entirely.

• /grill-me — the same relentless interview as /grill-with-docs, but stateless: it saves nothing locally and builds no CONTEXT.md. Reach for it when you are not working in a working directory — sharpening a plan, a design, a piece of writing, anything with no repo under it. If you are in a working directory, use /grill-with-docs instead: it runs the same interview and leaves a paper trail, so it is strictly the better one.
• /grilling — the interview primitive itself: rounds, the frontier, facts are the agent's job and decisions are yours. /grill-me and /grill-with-docs are the two named ways in, and /triage, /wayfinder and /improve-codebase-architecture all run it internally. Reach for it directly only when you want the interview with no wrapper around it.
• /resolving-merge-conflicts — work an in-progress merge or rebase conflict hunk by hunk, resolving by intent traced to each side's primary source rather than by picking lines, then finish the operation. It never runs --abort. Standalone and off every flow: reach for it when you are already mid-conflict.
• /prototype — a small, throwaway program that answers one design question: does this state model feel right, or what should this UI look like. Throwaway is a constraint on how the code is written, not a promise to destroy it: the answer folds into the real code, and the prototype itself is kept as a primary source on a prototype/<name> branch out of main, pointed at from the implementation issue. It's the detour in step 2 of the main flow, but reach for it any time a design question is hard to settle on paper.
• /research — delegate reading legwork to a background agent: it investigates a question against primary sources, then leaves a cited Markdown file in the repo. Keep working while it reads. The file it produces is something to take into the main flow at /grill-with-docs — research feeds the thinking, it doesn't replace it.
• /to-questionnaire — when the thing blocking you isn't in your head or the codebase but in someone else's, this writes them a questionnaire to fill in. It's the inverse of /grill-me: instead of interviewing you about the subject, it interviews you about the send — who it's going to, what you need back — and aims the questions at the gap. What comes back is material for /grill-with-docs or /to-spec.
• /wizard — for the steps only a human can take: provisioning infrastructure, setting up credentials or CI secrets, clicking through an unfamiliar third-party dashboard, running a one-off migration or cutover. It generates an interactive bash script that opens each URL, captures each value, and writes it into .env and GitHub secrets — so the procedure stops being something you re-explain to an agent every time. Model-invoked, so the agent reaches for it the moment it hits a wall only you can pass. If the agent could just do it itself, it should; this is for where a human is genuinely in the loop.
• /wait-what — the corrective for a message that didn't land. Use it mid-conversation, inside any other skill, and the agent re-pitches what it just said with the context you were missing, in plain English, using the CONTEXT.md vocabulary. It works after the fact; /grill-with-docs is the upfront cure, because a shared language agreed early is what stops the jargon arriving at all.
• /teach — learn a concept over multiple sessions, using the current directory as a stateful workspace.
• /writing-for-agents — reference for writing documents agents consume: skills, AGENTS.md, pointed-at docs.

Precondition

/setup-matt-pocock-skills — run before your first engineering flow to configure the issue tracker, triage labels, and doc layout the other skills assume. Custom issue trackers also work.