New Skills! v1.2 brings /wait-what, /writing-for-agents, and fixes /grill-me

Version 1.2.0 overview

00:00Skills, skills, skills. Folks, we have yet more skills for you. This is version 1.2.0, which adds a bunch of improvements to my already extremely popular engineering skills. The skills repo is now, I think, the 24th most starred repo of all time on GitHub, up to 24K stars.

00:15And as a

New documentation site

00:18mature project, we need some proper documentation. And so, we have it. This is at aihero.dev/skills. and I've been working with my team to produce this absolutely wonderful site. The best way to navigate this is by going to the main page/skills and then looking at the kind of groupings that we've got here.

00:36For instance, we can see here the main flow where you start with grill with docs then go to to spec then to tickets implement and then code review. And the lefth hand panel here you've got a full reference of every single skill and what they do.

00:46It used to be my actual uh full-time job to write documentation and so I was pretty happy to go back to it. There's even a list of common questions which are actually sourced from a personal wiki that I maintain of all the questions people ask me.

00:59These skills are also linked to an AI coding dictionary that I've been putting together. For instance, this little ticket link here is the dictionary definition for what I think of as a ticket. So these docs, not only can you use them to learn my skills better, you can also use them just to learn about AI coding and understand how things work at a deep level.

01:17The second

Claude Code marketplace integration

01:19big change is we are now an official part of the Claude Code official plug-in marketplace. What that means is you can open Claude Code. You can say plugin like this. You can search for Matt Pocco here or Matt PCO skills and then you can install it right from here.

01:33This means you end up with a readonly bundle. There's no extra steps here and any updates I make to the skills will be automatically pulled down to you. That

Codex compatibility improvements

01:43sounds pretty good if you're a Claude Code user. But what if you're a Codeex user? What's in this release for you? Well, I now include OpenAI.YAML files for every single skill, which means that it should properly work out of the box with UIs like codeex UI and also it means that this allow implicit invocation false travels over to codeex.

02:04Before we had model invoked skills and user invoked skills and the benefit of user invoked skills which we can see inside the main skilled MD file is these are hidden from the agents context window until you invoke them. That works for clawed code.

02:18It works for pi. Works for a couple of other harnesses but it doesn't work for codecs. I didn't quite realize that. And so now we ship these sidecar files with every single skill to mean that we have this allow implicit invocation false. So that works out of the box with codeex 2.

02:31The next thing I

Wait What skill for clarity

02:33wanted to ship a skill for is that Opus, especially Opus 5, is talking garbage at the moment. I don't understand what it is. I think it might just be a new model thing. But for some reason, every time I interact with Opus, I it just goes right over my head.

02:47It's incredibly verbose. It uses really weird LLM phrases, and I just find it really, really hard to read, and a lot of people feel the same. The honest options are to accept it and reword the AC or to persist the digest along the export. So a resumed unchanged publish can skip the read to flagging rather than picking.

03:03What does that mean? It is genuinely loadbearing though. So that's how you know it matters. I've tried all sorts of ways to fix it such as output styles or adding things to my agent.md. But what I realized I needed was just a skill to say wait what did you just say?

03:15And so the skill is called wait what? It's very very simple skill that just does a couple of things. First, it says, "Use this specific standard ASD STE 100 simplified technical English, which is essentially just a leading word to the agent to say, use very simple language.

03:34Speak in clear declarative sentences." And secondly, it also tells it to ground itself in the ubiquitous language in context.md. The real cure for verbosity is not to tell it to use simple language, although we are doing a bit of that. is to tell it to use your language, the stuff that you have come up with in Grill with Docs.

03:51You use this skill whenever the agent just creates some random garbage and you've no idea what they just said. You just say, "Wait, what?" and it should reply with a much better alternative. The next thing

Grill Me multi-question rounds

04:02that's changed is a pretty big one. It's an update to my most popular skill, which is Grill Me. Previously, Grill Me used to grill you one question at a time. In other words, you'd get a question and then you would respond and then another question, then you would respond.

04:16So, one question per turn. However, this has a horrible failure mode, which is when you get to the end of a grilling session and most of the hard stuff is already done, you just have a bunch of easy questions, one per turn, that you're just basically saying, "Yeah, that sounds good.

04:30Yeah, that sounds good, too." This is incredibly frustrating and it feels dead slow. So, for a while, I've wanted to find a way to speed this up. The thing that makes most sense to me is to have multiple questions per turn. So if you have lots of easy ones, you can just say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

04:46But what happens when the answer to question three depends on the answer in question one? Before you never had that problem because you would just answer them one at a time. So if a question depended on an earlier question, then that one had already been answered.

05:01But in this new setup, surely that's more confusing because you're going to be answering erroneous questions or questions at the wrong time or questions that need to be answered before other questions. How is that going to work? Well, if you think about it, these questions are really like a graph.

05:14There might be one critical question at the very start that needs answering first that opens up a whole raft of other questions that maybe they lead on to other questions themselves. And so now, Grillilme is designed to follow this graph to answer only the questions that are available now, but to ask them in rounds.

05:30And so you get the first round of questions, which might be as little as one critical question. Then you go to the next round of the questions that opens up. and it's always pushing you as fast as possible down the frontier of questions. And this is what it looks like.

05:45You can see I'm at round one here and we have Q1. And then we get this little recommendation here. I've decided to use I know I know you probably don't like it, but I love it. Emojis here for a little pop of color. This makes it super easy to navigate with my eyes.

06:01I can see, okay, this is Q1 and then I can see the recommended answer. Q2, see the recommended answer. And because I'm using dictation, I just get to blast out. Okay, Q1, I agree. Q2, I agree. Q3, we need something to change there. Q4, we need something to change.

06:17And then further down, we can see round two came in and the same setup. So, we answered the first round of questions and then we got another round of questions and we kept pushing the

Writing for agents skill

06:27frontier back. The next big change is that I've modified my writing great skills skill because I noticed that I was using it for stuff other than skills. I was using it for anything that an agent read to make the agent better to make the dock more concise and to make the output a bit more predictable.

06:44And so now we have writing for agents where you can modify it for agents.mmd or claw.md or when you're creating editing skills and it has some extra skill mechanics stapled on inside this reference file. So you can use it for writing skills, you can use it crucially for taking your agents.mmd pulling it out into skills to stop that horrible frontloading.

07:06So overall I find myself using this skill so so often whenever I need to write any agent configuration and I want it to read well. I want the agent to perform well with it. Writing for agents is the right call. And it's also model invocable as well.

07:19And it's a really clean description here. So, it should pull it in whenever it's modifying agents.mmd, which is just

Wizard skill for provisioning

07:27great. The next one is a new skill, one that I've been keeping under wraps for a little while. This is the wizard skill. I found myself recently having to provision a bunch of uh infrastructure and walk through a bunch of AWS stuff and I just hated it and I thought, surely there's a way that the agent can help me here.

07:43And so, I created this wizard skill that generates an interactive bash wizard that walks the human through steps only they can perform. In other words, I probably could have got the agent to okay, go into AWS and provision the stuff with computer use or something, but it just felt pretty icky.

07:58I wanted to have control over all of it, but I wanted it to be as easy as possible. And here is what one looks like. This was for, I think, migrating to a remote box setup. So, you just kick it off and then you say, "Ready to start? Yes, please."

08:10And then it sends me off to exactly the page I need to go. That opened the script, by the way. I didn't need to do anything there. sends me off, gets me to login, gets me to change the exact thing we need to. I can then paste in my API keys.

08:23And remember, this is a deterministic script, so nothing's touching an agent here. It's not sending it off to Anthropic or anything. So, I paste it in here. It saves it into the files it needs to. It's even saving them into GitHub secrets if it needs to.

08:35And it walks through these separate stages with me, keeping going with this nice little UI until we end up with what we need. I found that this takes provisioning services from incredibly painful to weirdly joyful because I just know how long it took me before.

08:48So, wizard has become an essential part of my skill set. I had it in in progress for a couple of months and I just think, okay, it's time for you guys to see it.

To Questionnaire for collaboration

08:58The next one is certainly the most boring skill name that I've ever produced, but I found myself really really needing it and I realized it would be useful for more than what I had just used it for. It is called two questionnaire and its purpose is that you take the decisions inside a grilling session and you pull them out into a document that you can walk through with someone else.

09:18I was doing a wayfinder session to try to build a garden office in my back garden. And I realized that the agent was grilling me, but the person I really needed to speak to about it was my wife because my wife obviously is going to use this space too.

09:31And so we're going to design it together. And so I got the agent to take the stuff it was going to ask in the grilling session and turn it into a markdown document. I then put that into a Google doc. I sent that over to my wife and we walk through it together and then we pulled the answers back in to the agent.

09:46Now this is a skill that I hope someday to delete because it's sort of like a patch for the fact that agents are kind of hard to collaborate with at the moment. Some teams who have like uh what I consider a really good setup is they have the agent in Slack and they have these conversations they can then tag the agent in.

10:04So they can collaborate together, answer questions together, especially with stakeholders. And then the agent can actually pile in and go, "Okay, I'll implement it based on that." But a lot of people are not in that world right now. A lot of people are not AI native.

10:17Maybe they don't even have Slack or Microsoft Teams or something. And so actually having a document that you can just pull out, give to someone, they can comment on it on Google Docs or whatever is actually really useful. And

Wrap up and course announcement

10:29so that folks is basically it. We've got a tranch of new skills. I'm especially looking forward to your reactions to wait what because I think it will actually save your ass a couple of times when uh Opus is doing strange things. There were a few things that were just a bit too small to mention here.

10:42And so you can go to v1.2.0 in the GitHub releases to take a look at the full change log. And if you're digging this stuff, then I'm putting out an AI coding crash course, which is pretty different to the paid courses that I've put out before.

10:55Instead of being a cohort where you do it over a couple of weeks and everyone's doing it together, this is going to be a cheaper course that's available throughout the year. My personal opinion about AI coding is that it's kind of settling down a little bit.

11:08There's not actually that much has changed since about December last year. And so I now feel confident enough that I can put out a self-paced course that hopefully won't change too much even as things develop. I'm hoping to give you a stable foundation from which you can work and actually ship amazing stuff.

11:25And the link to this is down below and you can join the wait list. It should be coming out only in a couple of weeks, I think. So, thank you so much for watching. Enjoy the new skills and I will see you very soon.