Matt Pocock: Agent Skills and Engineering Workflows
9 Things People Get Wrong With My /grill-* skills
Seven videos on grilling, prototyping, planning, review, and software quality
A reviewed seven-video route through Matt Pocock’s agent-skills and engineering-workflow uploads from May 25 to August 19, 2026. Six tutorials cover Grill Me interviews, anti-slop review, repository-aware implementation, throwaway prototypes, Wayfinder decision maps, agent-facing writing, deterministic setup, and collaborator questionnaires. In a conversation hosted by Pocock, Uncle Bob Martin argues for deterministic quality gates, specialized agents, and modular architecture. The demonstrations and productivity claims are practitioner evidence, not controlled comparisons.
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Matt Pocock's Grill Me and Grill with Docs skills have an agent interview the developer to uncover missing decisions in a plan. He explains where that conversation helps and where it cannot replace engineering judgment: some questions can be answered in words, while others need working software to test an idea.
Key Points Covered
- Decide whether discussion can answer the question: Some decisions can be settled through conversation. To judge how an interface feels or behaves, build a prototype, try it, then bring the findings back to the planning session 01:01–03:08(opens in a new tab).
- Bound the scope before the interview expands: A large plan can hide questions that need a prototype and encourage speculation about work too far ahead. Split it into smaller decisions before the conversation consumes the model's available context 03:08–05:08(opens in a new tab).
- Treat grilling as a steered conversation: Passive use can let question count and scope grow without control; staying in discussion too long can also delay the executable evidence needed to answer the question 05:08–07:07(opens in a new tab).
- Preserve the decision history: Continue directly into implementation when context permits, or create a product requirements document or handoff from the same session. Clearing the conversation first loses the reasoning behind the agreed plan 07:07–09:02(opens in a new tab).
- Use model capability and concurrency deliberately: Pocock prefers a stronger model for broad planning questions and usually alternates between two sessions, but these are personal workflow heuristics rather than measured thresholds or throughput results 09:02–11:53(opens in a new tab).
Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzMNBN6xLLA(opens in a new tab)