Ask Matt

--- name: ask-matt description: Ask which skill or flow fits your situation. A router over the skills in this repo. disable-model-invocation: true --- # Ask Matt You don't remember every skill, so ask. Before stating what a skill does or recommending a step be skipped, read that skill's SKILL.md: the summaries here are for orientation only. 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`** sharpens the idea by interview. Start here whenever you are **working in a working directory**: it's stateful, retaining what it learns in `GLOSSARY.md` and ADRs. (No working directory? Use `/grill-me` instead, covered under 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**. Then work the tickets one of two ways: - **`/implement`** per ticket, **`/clear`ing context between each one**. On a local tracker that's one file per ticket under `.scratch//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. Each ticket is self-contained, so the last one's context is disposable. - **`/implement-spec`** for the whole spec in one run. It reads the tickets as a **task graph**, runs implementer subagents across the ready **frontier** in parallel, and lands everything on one **integration branch**. Reach for it when you'd rather orchestrate the build than drive each ticket yourself. - **No** → **`/implement`** right here, in the same context window. Either way, the code gets built by driving **`/tdd`** (one red-green slice at a time) and closes out with **`/code-review`**, a two-axis review (Standards + Spec) of the diff. `/implement` runs both per ticket; `/implement-spec`'s implementers each drive `/tdd`, and it runs one `/code-review` over the integration branch. 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. When the work goes up as a pull request, **`/pr`** shapes the body: the smallest visual that shows the change, before/after evidence that it works, and a one-way or two-way door call. It's model-invoked, so the agent reaches for it whenever it writes a PR. 4. **`/retro`** closes the loop. After a build, and especially one that went sideways, it looks back over the session and suggests changes to the agent's **environment**, not the code: navigation pointers, automated checks, the coding standards `/code-review` enforces, steering files, tooling. Mechanical mistakes become deterministic checks; judgement calls become coding standards. The next build then starts from a better environment. ### 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. Run `/retro` in the session it's looking back on, before you clear; after clearing, point it at that session's log instead. The limit on this is the **[smart zone](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/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. Once the fix is in, run **`/retro`** in the same session to ask what would have prevented the bug; where the real finding is that there's no good seam to lock it down, that's a job for **`/improve-codebase-architecture`**. - **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, so go straight to `/implement` only when the effort turned out genuinely small. ## Codebase health Not feature work, just upkeep. - **`/improve-codebase-architecture`** runs 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 `GLOSSARY.md` a clean glossary. - **`/codebase-design`** is 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`** writes 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`** compresses this context and seeds a fresh session with it. The **default**, at the bottom of the tree rather than the first reach. Read [PHASE-BOUNDARIES.md](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 `GLOSSARY.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`** is 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. - **`/prototype`** is 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/` 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`, since research feeds the thinking rather than replacing it. - **`/to-questionnaire`** comes in when the thing blocking you isn't in your head or the codebase but in **someone else's**, and it 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`** is 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`** is 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 `GLOSSARY.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`** is the 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.