This weeks' skills changelog: - /ubiquitous-language deprecated, use /grill-with-docs instead - /grill-with-docs for codebases, /grill-me everywhere else - Skills can now be used with any issue tracker - Experimental /diagnose and /triage skills

To follow all the changes as I make them, plus tips and tricks for getting the most out of agents, check out the skills newsletter:

we had deprecations for markdown files before GTA 6

Very cool @mattpocockuk I have been using Superpowers lately and it is sooo frustrating. Figured I will try it out as I had been using GSD before that. I am going to try your skills tomorrow on an existing codebase with multiple sub projects ranging from infrastructure, packages, apis and ui Any tips, or an intro video to how it should be use?

What was frustrating about superpowers?

It just always seems to want to add sub phases to a sub phase of a phase. It never really got anything complete. As part of normal conversation, you may mention something, next think you know its created a sub phase. Then your answering a question about the main phase, but then its tacked on 3 questions about this new subphase do this a few times and you're managing the flow instead of this meta framework managing it for you. It's hard to get 1 response that is a few paragraphs about what you are working on, where it shoves in issue F12 on SHA 12345, gives you 3 options to pick from to solve something then immediately starts talking about the new imagined phase from an off hand comment about the original architecture and how it just rewrote everything to accommodate your last off hand statement, and then give you another 3 questions (so 6 total now) asking for you to make a decision on it all. -- seems like i'm rambling, but actually happened today when building an AI Gateway backed by OpenRouter and me asking if we are OpenAI protocol compliant (i.e. can we use the OpenAI Sdk to interface with the new Gateway)

@mattpocockuk I started with superpowers, then switched to compound engineering which works quite well for me. The problem is it's a token burner, but I stuck with it. /grill-me is great, I'm looking forward to using it with a self-hosted LLM... some day ☺️

@AaronLayton @mattpocockuk We've made lots of improvements on the token usage over the last few weeks, but admittedly it's not the top priority. we unbashadly burn tokens to maximize the outcomes.

@ccidral @mattpocockuk Never heard of Compound Engineering - worth a try?

I’m going to start running improve-codebase-architecture periodically. I’ve run it twice and it surfaced some issues I never considered in my wildest dreams. It has also taught me a lot about architecture in general thanks for all this work Matt you are a G.O.A.T

Thanks matt, I have a bunch of gh issues that desperately need the triage skill 🫡

it's always joy to see your videos, thanks man!

shipping a changelog every week is itself building in public at its best, love how you keep iterating openly like this

For me the grill-me-with-docs complete ignores the ADR. Also i notice, that the 'with-docs' compared to the 'plain' grill me tends to ignore the codebase, and just ask questions for things that are right in front it. Also visible in tool calls.

Useful, could you raise an issue?

@mattpocockuk Can/should we assume that these really cool and valuable skills you're producing, are going to become more and more obsolete as the frontier models (and harnesses) become better? Are these skills just filling the gap between today's models and the future?

When do we get to /grill-with-matt ? Suns out in london

@mattpocockuk Really looking forward to have set of skills targetting specifically for quality engineering

No need to look forward, it's here!

Where did it go /plan-interview ?

i just shared grill-me with a colleague and wasn't so about whether we should use groll-with-docs for grilling plans now

Yep, use /grill-with-docs whenever you're in a codebase

Thanks for the skills updates! Any plans for a plugin so if I have 2 skills with same folder name yours doesn’t get wiped out when I update?

what’s the best way to update/upgrade? Is pulling and reinstalling enough?

Should /grill-with-docs just work out of the box for existing codebases or should we do some preparation work to set it up for success?

It'll just work, it's incrementally adoptable

So wait... where did domain-model go? 😅

Renamed to /grill-with-docs

When you said /setup-matt-pocock-skills sets up CLAUDE.md, I was dissapointed to hear it only supports Claude, but then I looked at the skill itself and it supports both CLAUDE and AGENTS.md.

/grill-me is an awesome skill, can’t wait to try /grill-with-docs. Am I getting it right that it’s basically grill-me, but it also captures and documents the decisions from the session?

Correct!

Why ubiquitous language has been deprecated?

Check the video!

I will!

Grill-me has replaced ALL planning modes in ALL harnesses for me. I adopted grill-with-docs with my own project specific variant. Also very useful.

Hi Matt, a quick query, does Diagnose skills creates ADR and invoke TDD?

Diagnose skill sort of has its own TDD loop going on. I don't think it creates ADRs. It just reads them.

that’s amazing 🤩

I just used ubiquitous language yesterday 💀

started testing them out!

I'm struggling to keep the agents using the design system. They keep doing slop. Any skill for keeping the agents with the design system, reuse components etc?

I'd say to use /write-a-skill to write your own skill to do that!

Does 110 lines make sense for a skill? Or is it too much? Any advice for creating a good skill?

@mattpocockuk this might be a good topic for a video. How to create great skills

/grill-with-docs replacing /ubiquitous-language is the rename of the year. the new name actually says what it does.