Align with your coding agent using a grilling session
Small composable skills that fix the most common agent failure, misalignment, by making the agent ask questions first.
TL;DR
Before the agent writes code, run /grill-me (or /grill-with-docs) so it asks detailed questions about what you are building. The repo's skills are small and composable so you can adapt them.
Why this repo matters
It targets a failure everyone hits: you assume the agent knows what you want, and it built something else. The author's fix is a conversation first, which is also a good model for conversational product design.
Best practices
- Align before building: a questioning session on every non-trivial change.
- Keep skills small and composable instead of adopting a process that owns your workflow.
- Give the agent a shared vocabulary of the project's domain, so it stops being verbose.
- Configure per repo: the setup skill asks for your issue tracker, triage labels and where docs live.
How-to
Where do I start?
1. Install the skills
For Copilot CLI:
copilot plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills
copilot plugin install mattpocock-skills@mattpocock
Other agents are covered in the README, including npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills.
Try it
Pick a feature you were about to prompt for, start with /grill-me, and compare the plan with what you would have asked for directly.
Pitfalls
- Installing both the plugin and the copied files gives you every skill twice; pick one per agent.
- Skipping the grilling for "small" changes, where misalignment is cheapest to avoid.
Next steps
Read the README's second failure mode, verbosity, and the ubiquitous-language idea from Domain-Driven Design.