Grill-Me Skills emerging

Core approach

Deliberately anti-pipeline: the README names Spec Kit and BMAD as approaches that "own the process" at the cost of user control, and offers small, hackable, composable skills instead. The core primitive is grilling — walk the plan's decision tree one question at a time, each question paired with a recommended answer, reading the codebase for anything it can settle itself. Two front doors wrap it: grill-me (stateless, leaves no artifacts) and grill-with-docs (writes a CONTEXT.md ubiquitous-language glossary and sparing ADRs as terms and decisions resolve), feeding a spec → tickets → implement chain the user drives step by step.

Workflow

1. /setup-matt-pocock-skills — one-time per-repo config: issue tracker (GitHub, Linear, or local files), triage labels, doc locations
2. /grill-me or /grill-with-docs — one-question-at-a-time interview down the plan's decision tree; the docs variant captures terms into CONTEXT.md and hard-to-reverse decisions into ADRs inline
3. /to-spec — synthesize the settled conversation into a spec (problem, user stories, seams, out-of-scope) and publish it to the tracker, without re-interviewing
4. /to-tickets — split the spec into tracer-bullet vertical-slice tickets, each declaring its blocking edges
5. /implement — build the tickets via red-green-refactor TDD at the pre-agreed seams, then run /code-review (standards + spec axes) and commit
6. /wayfinder — optional upstream step for efforts too big for one session: chart a map of investigation tickets first

Supported tools

• Claude Code
• Codex
• Any skills-compatible agent

Notes

The grill-me family is the explicit counter-position to the pipelines tracked elsewhere in this observatory: its README argues that frameworks like Spec Kit and BMAD help by owning the process, but in doing so take away control and make process bugs hard to fix. Its bet is the opposite — that alignment (via the grilling interview) matters more than artifacts, and that the durable in-repo record should be a vocabulary (CONTEXT.md) and decision log (ADRs) rather than regenerable specs, which it publishes to the issue tracker as coordination artifacts instead. Unusually for the category, the repo dogfoods its own method: an .agents/ directory, in-tree ADRs, and changeset-driven releases.

Added Jul 18, 2026 · Assessment last reviewed Jul 18, 2026 · How we track