--- title: Matt Pocock's AI Coding Skills: From... description: Matt Pocock has expanded his 'AI Skills for Real Engineers' collection of Claude Code plugin skills with a new addition called /wayfinder. The original toolkit... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/matt-pocock-s-ai-coding-skills-from-requirement-grilling-to-fog-of-war-planning-vlkst4zef twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Matt Pocock's AI Coding Skills: From Requirement-Grilling to Fog-of-War Planning | daily.dev og:description: Matt Pocock has expanded his 'AI Skills for Real Engineers' collection of Claude Code plugin skills with a new addition called /wayfinder. The original toolkit... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/matt-pocock-s-ai-coding-skills-from-requirement-grilling-to-fog-of-war-planning-vlkst4zef og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/vLKst4zef.png og:image:alt: Matt Pocock's AI Coding Skills: From Requirement-Grilling to Fog-of-War Planning og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Matt Pocock's AI Coding Skills: From Requirement-Grilling to Fog-of-War Planning **[Collections](https://daily.dev/sources/collections)** · 4 min read · 5 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Matt Pocock has expanded his 'AI Skills for Real Engineers' collection of Claude Code plugin skills with a new addition called /wayfinder. The original toolkit includes /grill-me (interrogates requirements before coding), /to-spec and /to-tickets (convert conversations into issues/tickets), /teach (generates lessons), and /ask-matt (documentation assistant). Grill-me works for well-scoped features but fails for ambiguous, exploratory projects where the end state isn't known upfront. Wayfinder addresses this using a 'fog of war' planning metaphor, splitting work into Maps (accumulated decisions), Tickets (categorized tasks), and Sessions (working threads), with an orchestrator managing handoffs between sessions to handle context window limits automatically. Pocock emphasizes consistent 'leading words' terminology as a deliberate design constraint shaping agent behavior, and is developing a broader AI coding terminology dictionary. His guidance: use grill-me for well-understood features, wayfinder for ambiguous or exploratory work. ## Content Matt Pocock has been quietly building out a suite of Claude Code plugin skills aimed at making AI coding agents actually useful for real engineering work, not just autocomplete-with-extra-steps. The project, called "AI Skills for Real Engineers," has picked up enough traction that Pocock is now, by total views, the top speaker in AI Engineer's event history. His /grill-me skill reportedly made its way up to Satya Nadella at some point (with some variations along the way, as these things tend to go). Here's what's actually in the toolkit and why it matters. ## The core skills **/grill-me** interrogates your plan before you write any code. Instead of jumping straight into implementation, it asks follow-up questions to pull out requirements you didn't realize you had. It's the difference between an agent guessing what you meant and an agent actually checking. **/to-spec** and **/to-tickets** turn that conversation into something durable. One saves the work as a spec or issue; the other breaks a larger feature into tickets that respect dependencies, so you're not left untangling what needs to happen before what. **/teach** generates custom lessons on demand, and **/ask-matt** explains what the other skills do, essentially a built-in FAQ for the whole system. If your feature is small and you already understand it, /grill-me is probably enough. But Pocock built something else for the messier cases. ## /wayfinder: for when you don't know what you don't know Greenfield projects and ambiguous features have a specific problem: you can't write a full upfront plan because you don't yet know what the plan needs to cover. Pocock calls this the "fog of war" - each decision you make reveals a bit more of the map, rather than the whole thing being visible from the start. /wayfinder is his answer to that. It splits planning into three kinds of artifacts: - **Map** - the accumulated decisions so far - **Tickets** - specific tasks, categorized as grilling, prototype, research, or task - **Sessions** - the actual working threads An orchestrator layer sits on top and manages handoffs between these planning threads, so you're not the one manually tracking how much context window you've burned through. That's a small detail but it matters a lot in practice - context management is exactly the kind of bookkeeping that quietly eats your attention if you're doing it by hand. swyx described it well: /wayfinder is basically /grill-me for /grill-me - for when you're navigating the fog of war and need to orchestrate research and multiple grilling sessions just to figure out what you don't know yet. ## Why terminology is the actual hard part What comes up repeatedly in Pocock's explanation of this project is how much weight precise language carries when you're steering an agent. He calls these "leading words" - specific, consistent terms that guide agent behavior in predictable ways. Sloppy or inconsistent terminology means inconsistent agent behavior, which is a much harder problem to debug than it sounds. This is apparently serious enough that Pocock is building a full AI coding terminology dictionary, meant to unify the language across his courses and skills rather than let each one drift into its own vocabulary. It's a less flashy piece of the project than the skills themselves, but it might be the part that makes everything else actually work. ## Getting started Installation is straightforward through the Claude Code plugin marketplace, though there's a known caching issue worth knowing about ahead of time: if a skill doesn't show up right after install, clearing the marketplace cache usually fixes it. For picking which skill to reach for: use /grill-me for small, well-scoped features where you basically know what you're building. Save /wayfinder for the ambiguous, exploratory stuff where the endpoint isn't clear yet and you need something to help you feel your way there. ## Questions this post answers ### What is the wayfinder skill for Claude Code and when should I use it instead of grill-me? Wayfinder is a Claude Code plugin skill designed for ambiguous or exploratory projects where the end state isn't known upfront, using a 'fog of war' planning metaphor instead of requiring a complete plan before coding. It splits work into Maps (accumulated decisions), Tickets (categorized as grilling, prototype, research, or task), and Sessions (working threads), with an orchestrator managing handoffs between sessions. Use grill-me instead for small, well-understood features needing requirement clarification. _Engineers weighing AI planning tools for ambiguous projects can follow tool comparisons like this on daily.dev._ ### What does the /grill-me skill do in Matt Pocock's Claude Code plugin collection? The /grill-me skill interrogates a plan before any code gets written, asking follow-up questions until requirements are detailed enough to act on rather than letting an AI agent guess at missing details. It works best for well-scoped features where the main risk is under-specification, but isn't designed for greenfield or exploratory projects with unknown end states. _Developers refining AI coding workflows track skill releases like this one via daily.dev._ ### How do I fix a Claude Code plugin skill not showing up after installing it from the marketplace? Clearing the marketplace cache typically resolves the issue when a newly installed skill doesn't appear in Claude Code. This is a known cache issue with the plugin marketplace installation process. _Anyone troubleshooting Claude Code plugin installs can find similar fixes surfaced on daily.dev._ --- Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#prompt-engineering](https://daily.dev/tags/prompt-engineering), [#claude-code](https://daily.dev/tags/claude-code) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/matt-pocock-s-ai-coding-skills-from-requirement-grilling-to-fog-of-war-planning-vlkst4zef) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Matt Pocock's AI Coding Skills: From Requirement-Grilling to Fog-of-War Planning","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/matt-pocock-s-ai-coding-skills-from-requirement-grilling-to-fog-of-war-planning-vlkst4zef","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/matt-pocock-s-ai-coding-skills-from-requirement-grilling-to-fog-of-war-planning-vlkst4zef"},"datePublished":"2026-08-20T21:05:31.359Z","dateModified":"2026-08-20T21:23:30.899Z","description":"Matt Pocock has expanded his 'AI Skills for Real Engineers' collection of Claude Code plugin skills with a new addition called /wayfinder. 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