Shadowing Practice: So I tried Matt's skills... - Learn English Speaking with Video
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There is one particular GitHub repo that I've been eyeing for a long time
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and just never took the time to dive into.
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It's by a person that I've interacted with a bunch in the past, who if you've been around for a while,
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I am sure you're familiar with.
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I've often called myself the second best TypeScript YouTuber, and the reason is because of this individual, the number one, Matt Pocock.
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He published a set of AI skills for real engineers that I honestly kind of dismissed initially, really.
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But over time, he has continued to refine them and be realistic with them.
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And what he's created is a set of small
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and simple markdown files that have racked up over 200 ,000 stars on GitHub,
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making it one of the 10 most starred projects on all of GitHub.
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Truly insane.
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All for markdown files.
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I've wanted to see what the hype was about for a while here.
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And I've seen people saying really good things about them, especially the grill me skill.
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And this has also been a video I've planned for a while to the point where my whole
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Twitch chat is freaking out Thank you.
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I stayed up till 3 a .m for this.
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Long overdue.
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Finally, three streams ago.
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Since this was put in Notion, Matt's updated the skills multiple times.
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Yeah.
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You guys have wanted to get my honest thoughts on these skills for a while.
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In order to do that, I had to use them.
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So I did.
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Over the last week, I installed a bunch of the skills from Matt Pocock's skills repo,
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which is full of gems that are worth talking about from his process to the actual skills themselves.
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If I only covered Matt's skills, though, I'd be doing this ecosystem a disservice.
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The vast majority of these skill repos are absolute slop and should be ignored.
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But there is one other I'm excited about.
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Pstack, created by Lauren, otherwise known as Potato, one of my old favorite
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React core team members who is now at Cursor
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and built a wild set of skills that are really fun and surprisingly powerful.
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I have went through and audited the majority of the skills in both of these suites, pulled in my favorites, and I've been using them actively.
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I cannot wait to show you everything I've learned after a real quick break for today's sponsor.
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Let's be honest with ourselves.
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We've moved past the era of doing one thing at a time.
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And as great as this is, there's a lot of random problems it's caused.
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Things like knowing where to run your code when you're working on it.
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Things like making sure your CI is actually running performantly and well, and that it's doing things in parallel.
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And just knowing what's going on across all of the projects that are shipping at your company.
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All of this is obnoxious to do by hand and it's becoming more and more of my work.
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Well, it was before I started using today's sponsor.
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You've probably already heard me talk about Depot.
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They're the best place for your GitHub CI and for your Docker builds, which makes everything way faster,
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up to 55 times faster for a lot of real world use cases.
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Their best in class runners make everything faster and their cache helps everyone on the team get started quicker too.
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The cache is shared across your entire team and your CI for your Docker builds, which helps a ton with speed.
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GitHub actions are also way faster to up to 10 times faster
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when you use them on depot than with traditional github action ci
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and if you add the depot ci runners things go even faster
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because they can do actual parallelism
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but that's not what i promised
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i was talking about working in parallel not just building in parallel well
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that's where depot's remote agent sandboxes come in making it trivial to spin up your real images
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and your real projects in the cloud with your clod code
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if you already have depot set up you can just run depot clod instead of clod directly
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and is now running in a remote sandbox instead.
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Ship faster and unblock yourself at soydiv .link slash depo.
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A couple things I want to say up front before we go too deep into all of these skills
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that have been provided by these different places.
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The first thing, and I really want to emphasize this, you do not get anything out of blindly copying other people's setups.
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You should treat these things not as a set of steps to take,
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rather as a set of information to consider as you build your own systems for coding with AI
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if you just copy paste my code base
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and change things you're not a very good engineer but
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if you use my code base as a reference point to learn
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and build your skills as you craft your own code bases
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then you're a good engineer the same difference applies here
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if you just blindly copy my exact setup
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it's like paying a bunch of money for a code template it's cringe
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and bad it means you suck at engineering period so don't just blindly install all the skills here at the very least,
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start with a slightly better entry point.
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I see my chat realizing that
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Potato was one of the builders of the React compiler.
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She was one of the biggest contributors there.
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She's unbelievably talented.
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Yeah, PStack is going to be the underrated gem in this, and I think you guys will like it a lot.
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I want to start first with how I set this all up.
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I started with a prompt.
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I want to figure out which
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Potato PStack skills would map well to the work that I do.
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I want you to audit my usage across my main machines, which were this MacBook, LeftBook, and BB1.
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Compare my usage against the skills in pstack make a nice list ranking all of them by how well
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they fit me
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and how much they could benefit me pull history here first
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then break up sub -agents to do auditing opus 5 for all
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i had a bunch of opus 5 to burn at the time
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so that's why i was testing this
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and i linked pstack it then created this document for me where it pulled in all the skills and then ranked them.
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based on how strong of a fit they were, as well as how beneficial they would be to my work, and then a little brief why.
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So it immediately called out the interrogate skill, blast radius, technical writing, arena, the prove it works skill, and a few others.
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I will say that this deep dive was inspired by one particular thing.
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It was the interest I had in the unslop skill, because I had seen Lauren posting some of the prose that her agents wrote.
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I was like, oh, that looks significantly less cringe than I'm used to Claude writing.
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So I quickly grabbed this unslop skill, which is very, very simple.
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There's also some fun prompting details here in the descriptions
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Potato uses, because again, as I mentioned before in my like Markdown overhaul video, the descriptions role is to accurately describe everything the skill does,
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because it's just fucking Markdown.
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The only point of the description is to trigger the skill when it should trigger.
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You should treat the description as the thing that gets the model
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to do this rather than as an accurate description of everything the model can do with the skill.
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I see it kind of similar to a YouTube video thumbnail
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where the role of the thumbnail is to accurately encapsulate everything that the video has in it.
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It is to get the right person to stop scrolling and click it and watch it.
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The goal of the description is similar.
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It's to get the right agent for the right task to decide, oh, that skill is useful.
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I should pull that in.
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It shouldn't be called the description.
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It should be called the trigger.
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All of these standards were written in the old anthropic days before anyone knew what the fuck
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they were doing we're stuck with it it is what it
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is anyways let's take a look at what the skills actual content is
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so again if you're familiar with how skills work they have a name
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and a description the models have access to all of your skills they just see the name
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and the description and then they decide oh
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that skill could be useful to be right now based on its description i'm going to pull it in now
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and then what it does is it just reads this markdown file into context so when it pulls in the unslop skill, here's what it reads.
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Edit text to remove AI patterns and add a human voice.
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The process is simple.
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Scan for the patterns, rewrite, preserve meaning, match intended tone, add some soul, and then self -audit.
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Quote, what makes this obviously AI generated?
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Then you go and fix the remaining tells.
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Adding soul.
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Removing patterns is half the job.
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Sterile, voiceless writing is just as obvious. Have opinions.
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React to facts instead of neutrally listing pros and cons.
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Vary rhythm, short sentences, then longer ones that take their time.
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Mix it up.
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Acknowledge complexity.
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Well, impressive, but also kind of unsettling beats impressive.
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Use I when it fits.
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First person isn't unprofessional.
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Let some mess in.
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Perfect structure looks machine made. Be specific.
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Not this is concerning.
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Rather, there's something unsettling about agents churning away at 3am.
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Don't call me out like this.
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Patterns to detect and fix.
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This is one of the things LLMs are really good at.
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If you give them an example of bad and then show them good, they will follow good very well.
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But if you don't have certain things in those examples, they will continue to do them bad.
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So you got to find the balance there.
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The patterns to detect and fix.
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The first is in content puffery.
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So lots of these phrases, pivotal moment, testament to evolving landscape, setting the stage, cut the puffery, say what happened, name dropping,
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listing media outlets without context, just pick one
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and say what was said superficial dash ing phrases like highlighting
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ensuring reflecting showcasing delete them promotional language as well vague
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you get the idea it also calls out m dash overuse somehow
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i still see a lot of m dashers coming out of opus the others have followed
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this much better chat saying
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that it's a good thing to point out how good the semantic density is here
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i agree this is not slop this is very easy to read
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and the info is communicated very effectively it's just well written
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and when you have good writing in your history the models are more likely to follow it and
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if you tell said models to follow
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it they're much more likely to there's also a whole section here to remove chatbot phrases like i hope
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this helps let me know
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if found the smoking gun all those types of things no mention of load bearing sadly
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there's a whole section about jargon this is my favorite piece, though.
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Say what it does, not how it feels.
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Instead of, the database stays close at hand, say something much more direct.
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.2 SQL returns the exact string sent to the database.
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That's so much better.
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Ask what the sentence tells the reader to do or know, then write that.
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If you can't restate it as a concise instruction, fact, or number, cut it.
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One more check.
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If the sentence could appear unchanged in another project's docs, it says nothing about this one.
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Cut it
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so let's see how this works
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i will just ask with gpt 5 .6 high fast
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you know what we'll give it something harder i'll use opus 5
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it's going to take too long i'm going to stick with soul for this just
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because it will be done faster what is this project help me understand it
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and why someone would be interested in using it
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or I could just grab like any of my other existing codex threads and you'll see the difference.
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Here's one where I asked it to update my SwiftUI app.
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Build 26 is uploaded to App Store Connect and processing.
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Also completed.
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Bullet point list of the exact things done.
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Public distribution cannot yet be verified because the App Store Connect browser session expired.
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Sign in at link.
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Then I can assign build 26 to the public beta group if automatic distribution does not handle it.
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This is so easy to read.
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It's so much better.
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And you'll notice when I make new prompts, one of the first things that happen is applying of the unslop skill.
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I'm also applying the required unslop writing skill so the answer stays direct and easy to scan.
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And then it did.
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And now it wrote a very simple, easy to read blob of text.
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T3 code is an open source control center for coding agents.
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Instead of using codecs, cloud code, cursor, grok, or open code through separate terminal tools.
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You control them through one desktop web or mobile app.
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I'll show you the comparison and the easiest way I can think to do it.
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I'm going to ask in chat GPT directly where I don't have my skills to look at T3 code.
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Same rough prompt, just like said what it was specifically to make it easier.
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Let's see how it does here without these skills.
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The core idea is already clear.
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T3 code is not another coding model and not mainly an editor.
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God, I didn't realize how quickly I adjusted to unslopped text.
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And now when I read the slop text, it hurts me.
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It's actually insane how much of a difference I can already see just from that.
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Again, T3 codes and open source control center for coding agents.
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The core idea is already clear.
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What using it looks like.
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A normal workflow is run the command, open a project, start a thread, ask it to inspect or change the project, review messages and code changes,
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continue from your desktop browser
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or phone t3 code also manages terminal terminals agent sessions get diffs
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and checkpoints each turn can have a checkpoint which lets you inspect
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or revert what the agent changed short version t3 codes across flower control center
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this is the like quote from the docs
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it turns these providers from separate terminal programs into one coherent agent workspace m dash with desktop web ios
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and android clients there's like t3 code is and t3 code is not the strongest pitch is not
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Chat with AI in nicer windows.
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It is operating several autonomous developers without living in several terminal tabs.
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Remote agents become practical.
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One interface across providers.
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It's designed for parallel work.
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The especially compelling use case for your setup.
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Versus why someone would use it.
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One interface works with several providers.
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Threads persist, so it works easier to resume.
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You can control agents on another computer from your phone or browser.
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Your files
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and provider credentials remain on the machine during running the server
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it's insane these both came from the same model for adding one markdown file it's
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so much more readable i have been enjoying coding
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so much more to install this one stupid skill thank you potato
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and thank you pstack for providing me this wonderful unslop skill hopefully you can now understand why i
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so quickly went down this rabbit hole it's because I was really impressed with that skill once I installed it.
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So I then went through all the pstack skills to see which other ones might fit me too.
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And as I was doing this, I had the realization that I'm sure you guys could have predicted
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that I also should probably look at the Matt Pocock skills.
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So I linked that as well
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and ended up getting another document of all of Matt's skills and which ones fit my use case as well.
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Now it's time to dive in to all of these skills and what value they can bring you.
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I've been focused on pstack for a bit too long.
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So let's hop over to Matt's skills instead.
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The main directory that we care about is skills slash skills slash engineering.
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There's ask Matt, code review, code base design, diagnosing bugs, domain modeling, grill with docs, which is an update to his grill me one,
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implement, improve code base architecture, prototype research, resolving merge conflicts, set up Matt Pocock skills as a skill itself.
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TDD, to spec, to tickets, triage, wayfinder, and wizard.
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I want to start by playing with a few of these.
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I'm going to grab the improved code -based architecture in Grill with Docs.
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If you're ever curious about a skill and how it behaves, the easiest thing to do isn't to install it and then hope for the best.
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It's actually quite simple.
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You can usually just copy paste it.
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In this case, this skill is calling for other skills.
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It's actually hilarious how simple the grill with docs is it's a relentless interview to sharpen a planner design
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which also creates docs adrs
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and glossary as we go he also has disabled model invocation on for a lot of his skills
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which means the model won't enable it itself you have to manually pull it in with a slash command
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or a dollar sign command or something like that
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which i think is a very good call
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because it was how some of his skills work
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but some of them that isn't necessarily the case like when I'm going through the diagnosing bugs skill.
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This one I probably shouldn't have to manually pull in
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and sure as hell he doesn't have this as a manually pull in skill.
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This is a skill that will invocate itself when it's helping debug issues.
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And I've had this skill fire
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and help with a lot of my debugging stuff over the last few days and it's been pretty solid.
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It seems like my agents find the root cause and can communicate what's wrong much more effectively.
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So let's look at the new grill me and grilling skills because these are the ones that are referenced there.
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Here is the grilling skill.
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Grill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea.
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Use when the user wants to stress test their thinking or use any grill trigger phrases.
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Interview the user relentlessly until you reach a shared understanding.
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Map this as a design tree.
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Every decision branches into the decisions that hang off it.
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Work the tree in rounds.
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The frontier is every decision whose prereqs are already settled.
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God, why is he using em dashes in his skills?
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Matt, Matt, how many are on this? there's nine m dashes in this page matt
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i was wondering why i was getting m dashes again
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it might be matt skills there's at least one per paragraph for most paragraphs oh
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this hurts me i'm still gonna try it
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and i told you guys it's an easy way to try skills
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you copy the text go to your agent you do whatever
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you want to do then you paste it i'm gonna ask it to grill not me and ask it to grill LakeBed.
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LakeBed, paste, pick machine.
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I want you to grill me about LakeBed.
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The project itself and its goals, everything in the agents, MD, Claude, MD, et cetera.
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I want to make sure we are on the same page about what we are building.
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I want to use Matt Pocock's grill skill.
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don't have it installed i will paste the text below
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and now i have successfully used the skill without installing anything by just copy pasting the text obviously
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this will not work with skills that have other things like scripts associated
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and whatnot but you can copy the script over it's fine
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or just tell the model about it it can go find the script
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and download it it's fine this is the easiest way to test out a text -only skill, literally just copy -paste the text.
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And now we have this Opus 5 run on my remote
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Linux box running, and it will grill the fuck out of me momentarily.
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It took almost two minutes, but it has its first pass here.
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CloudMD is badly stale.
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The repo contradicts its own v0 rule, and there are two competing execution models in the tree.
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question one who is the user
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and who pays as well as example answers we could give question two what is the actual next milestone
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because there's a mess of like launch prep files html files with like random plans the to -do md
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that's an organized from a pr cleanup program not as launch q3 is the capsule format a spec
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or just our implementation what is the ceiling of one capsule.
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These are actually good questions.
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And now I'm curious, do we get similarly good questions if I ask a different model?
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Let's switch over to Sol with the exact same thing.
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Oh, I already had the grilling skill installed.
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Yeah, I did carry that over.
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God, the 5 -6 autism is so real.
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The grilling skill requires me to find repo facts instead of asking you.
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I just realized I use this on low and slow.
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I should be using this on high and fast.
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Get better answers faster.
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I will stop that because I don't care anymore.
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Oh, wow.
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It finished before the stop even persisted.
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That's hilarious.
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What is Lakebed?
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Who is the primary customer?
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What does full autonomy mean?
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And what is a capsule?
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All good questions.
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Let's see how the Hi version does.
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Oh, and Hi, it spun up some sub -agents in the background to do more hunting to get more data for future questions.
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Start with the same what's Lakebed?
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Who is the primary user?
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All with like quick answers, which makes it really easy to go through just like 1A,
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2b 3a etc again like the question asking tools in a lot of these harnesses
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and agents just aren't good enough to have the like question asking
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you why come up this is a lot quicker to just blast through
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so one i'm gonna say it's the autonomous app platform two i'm gonna say these two are the users
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that matter three doesn't give me a simple answer
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but i can just tell it what i don't want which is agents who do everything other than payment details.
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Four, how much should Lakebed own?
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Own everything as needed.
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Five, which rule wins?
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The current guidance contains principles that will conflict.
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I want simple where possible, but also rewrite where beneficial.
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Six, what's the product boundary?
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Should Lakebed remain a real open and useful system while the host of cloud platform is the production path?
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Local is only dev sim.
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That's nice and easy.
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And I'm already realizing that I need to clean up this project based on the simple, quick start of this grilling section.
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Okay, I'm seeing the light.
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This is useful.
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I should have tried this before.
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Let's keep going through these skills.
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Teach is one I've heard really good things about.
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This one is also disabled model invocation.
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So you have to trigger this with slash teach.
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The user's asked you to teach them something.
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This is a stateful request.
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They intend to learn the topic over multiple sessions.
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Interesting.
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Treat the current directory as a teaching workspace.
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The state of their learning is captured in this directory in several files.
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Very interesting.
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So you're supposed to use the teaching skill in its own folder.
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Huh.
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I want to read more from the top level.
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I feel like I am not going through this the right way.
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Interesting.
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One of the skills is Ask Matt, which is specifically meant to help you
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You figure out what skills or flows fit your situation.
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There's grill with docs, as we talked about before.
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Triage, which helps move issues through a state machine of triage roles.
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Improve code -based architecture.
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This is the one I actually wanted to try.
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A lot of these are self -referential,
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where the code -based architecture one will say to run the code -based design skill in order to get the vocabulary.
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Present candidates as an HTML report.
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Nice, if somebody likes HTML skills,
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I like this a lot context md vocabulary for the domain then it calls out grilling as well as domain modeling
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wayfinder is a fun one too for planning huge chunks of work
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i also really like the separation in the docs between user invoked
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and model invoked because these are very different like these are effectively plugins
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that you call
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when you want them yourself model invoked is more steering the model to do different things in different ways
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and these ones are very useful
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Like I mentioned before, the diagnosing bugs one has helped me a ton already.
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Wizard seems really cool too.
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To walk human through steps only they can perform.
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This is super cool when like an agent can't access some dashboard it needs to
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or there's a pseudo call that it can't run.
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Wizard is a guide to help the agent set things up
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so that you can just run the one script and then handle things from there.
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Do I have this one?
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Because if I don't, I'm going to go at it now.
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I don't.
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I guess here I'll give you the spoiler of how I actually set up all of these things.
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I did all of this in a thread in T3 code in a repo
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that I already made called fleet where I manage all of my skill files and things.
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So in here, I'm going to do this specifically.
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I'm going to ask, did we set up the wizard skill from Matt's repo?
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If not, set it up now note
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that we have one more machine in the fleet to deal with well
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because since i last worked on this i added my new mac mini
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so i want to just give it a quick little hint
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that the new mac mini exists so that it will touch
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that as well apparently
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i should have been reading the docs the whole time my
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bad yeah the getting started is the setup skills command
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which helps you like set up issue tracking and whatnot in a way
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that the skills will handle
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it the main flow is to start with grill with docs get interviewed about a plan
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and record the decisions then to spec turn into a spec then two tickets to cut
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that into tickets for jira linear github issues whatever you want to use implement for actually building it
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and then code review for reviewing
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it after shaping is fun for turning vague ideas into real executable plans wayfinder helps
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you chart a large effort as a map of decisions
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and settle them prototype is for actually like making designs
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and mocking things to see what you really want before you ship it just deleteable code
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and the research skill for getting cited answers from primary sources i don't know
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if i would ever need
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that i feel like the agents are pretty good at verifying their claims
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if you just ask then we have improved code -based architecture
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this one seems fun diagnosing bugs resolving merge conflicts triage
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and wizard i am excited to try out wizard for activity
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skills like grill me handoff to questionnaire teach wait what
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and writing for agents then the reference skills like code -based design vocabulary for deep
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or designing deep modules covering the words a project uses
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and writing them down domain modeling i think is a really helpful one
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i've been in like writing down my own grammars
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and like glossaries with agents in every project on like what terms
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we use to do different things the idea of being a skill does make sense to me
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i am increasingly tempted to just install all of them
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but i'm very happy with my current setup and i don't want to muddy it too much more.
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So I'll continue doing what I normally do,
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which is just telling my agent to rip the parts I want and keep them in my fleet directory.
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This little fleet repo has saved my ass so many times.
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Well, that is running.
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Let's see the follow -up here.
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Okay.
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We got a bunch more questions.
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Which form of simplicity matters most?
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Oh, this is brutal because I want all of these types of simplicity.
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God, this gets deep.
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I don't want to answer these questions.
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That's the point, isn't it?
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I really don't have to answer this because my answer is all three of these.
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I want them all.
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Okay, I said I will begrudgingly pick A even though I want them all.
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What apps must LakeBed support?
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A and B, not C.
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How do the two primary users divide control?
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If the developer and agent are both primary, what does each one own?
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So like who chooses architecture, data models, deploy timing, et cetera?
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Dev chooses nothing but app functionality.
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Cool, that's it.
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That is answered.
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10. Does everything include irreversible actions?
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Authorized agents be able to delete production data.
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Yes, they should be able to do whatever.
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Where is the payment boundary?
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Will be sub plus monthly limits.
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Agents can use them as they please.
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12. What must the local simulation preserve be?
454
Cool.
455
This is great.
456
I'm actually disagreeing with the recommended answers pretty often too.
457
fuck this is actually going to help me I'm annoyed now this skill is on all my machines cool
458
opus caught all the changes to my systems
459
I know it's silly but like all this text is
460
so much more readable than older agentic stuff
461
I was doing in like the same project with the same code base and the same agents and models and everything thing.
462
I asked a question and it gave me a direct answer.
463
No, wizard was never set up.
464
It ranked seventh in the previous report, but you only pick seven skills and it wasn't among them.
465
It's installed now.
466
Whereas like if I scroll back far enough to things from before I had these set up, just like any old thread,
467
here's a recent changes summary.
468
Here's a ready to share write up.
469
I treated landed as changes that reach main.
470
T3 code the last three days.
471
Oh no, this is it trying to like match my tone.
472
Release publication now uses the job scoped github token instead of
473
competing for the right the shared release app api quota fixing repeated nightly failures oh god the m dash hell
474
i said push straight to his branch done the follow -up
475
commit is now on his pr branch directly m dash 5561 shows it's the fifth commit
476
and the review bots are rerunning against the new head his
477
pr is still based on one merge behind the thread pagination pr landed since it's still mergeable per github
478
so no action needed rebasing his branch under him felt more
479
intrusive than the situation called for worth watching whether the effect service convention check goes green now m dash
480
that was the hard blocker in my context reference approach is a lighter lighter remedy oh god
481
i can't even like read this
482
and i'm trying to like read it out loud for you guys in a video it's
483
so much worse god life post slop is unbelievably cool oh god
484
i got another like 10 plus questions for me i'm gonna do this off stream
485
but i'm actually going to do it
486
because these are good questions this does remind me
487
that i have a branch i was working on in t3 code
488
that i'm i have new ideas for now too i was working on a skill manager
489
feature in t3 code yeah this cross computer skill manager page
490
that i was working on to make
491
it easy to just manage skills on your machines through like
492
one layer what i want is now is the ability to
493
disable them en masse like to have groups of skills like the p stack skills
494
and the matt pocock skills and be able to turn them all on
495
or off or just turn on the ones i want oh
496
that would be
497
so nice yep the wizard skill has now appeared on all of my machines yay i don't have anything
498
that needs wizard right now but i am very excited to try
499
that one it makes a ton of sense to me
500
i will say most of these skills feel more like prescribing like mental workflows
501
and like giving you an easy entry point to try them out,
502
especially so like the main flow section here with the grill with docs to spec to take it implement code review.
503
I don't necessarily want this much prescription on how I go step by step, like I've been building my own workflows,
504
and they don't map quite as well to traditional stuff.
505
There's a ton of good things that I'm grabbing from here, like the wizard skill, the grilling skill is clearly super, super useful.
506
I'm going to play more with the code -based design and the follow -up cleanup ones.
507
I have heard
508
Wait What is really good, as well as the Writing for Agents.
509
The Writing for Agents one I've actually been using a bunch.
510
Writing Great Skills was turned into Writing for Agents.
511
This is useful because agents are really bad at writing instructions to other agents.
512
If you let your agents write skills for you, write markdown for you, write prompts to subagents for you, all those types of things,
513
it can do a very bad job.
514
So giving it better instructions on how to do it right sounds very compelling to me.
515
Wait, what's another one that I'm really excited about?
516
It pulls in Simplify Technical English, which a dedicated video on this bit coming in the near future.
517
It's a simple skill that's user invoked in three lines long.
518
The point is to get a simpler, easier to digest description of something when you get a response that makes no sense.
519
He does call out that this only repairs one message.
520
It doesn't prevent the next sloppy one.
521
The solution
522
and the cure for this type of jargon is a shared language built up front using the grill me with docs skill.
523
Reach for wait what when you don't have that setup done yet.
524
I am very excited for wizard I'm going to be using
525
that a ton I can think of like four things
526
I should have used it for yesterday
527
I really like how he's documenting all of this stuff like this is a good docs page
528
there's a lot to learn from here in the best sense here we are wait what super simple
529
and again it disable model invocation it means
530
you just type in the one skill invocation with the slash command dollar sign whatever wait not m dash ah
531
i almost want to make a dm dashed matt pocock skills fork where it's just the exact same repo
532
but all the m dashes removed the description stop
533
that last message did not land m dash repitch it god
534
i i almost want to see how many m dashes are in this project yeah
535
it's just one regex remove it all i know this is one
536
i was actually really excited about the the writing for agents oh
537
this one's long good it should be reference for writing any document that an agent consumes a skill an agent or ClaudeMD,
538
a doc reached by a pointer.
539
I've mostly been using this for prompting sub agents, and it's been very helpful there.
540
Too many MDashes still.
541
When the document you're writing is a skill, read the skill mechanics MD file for front matter invocation choice and router skills.
542
Context pointers.
543
Context pointers are reference held in the agent's context
544
that names some out of context material and encodes the condition for reaching it.
545
The skills description is one.
546
Align an agent MD naming a doc is the same object.
547
The pointer's wording, not its target, decides when an agent reaches the material
548
and how reliably a must -have target behind a weekly worded pointer is a variance bug
549
this is unreadable i mean i'm not surprised
550
but god damn ow versus unslop just a chunk of it no no
551
i don't trust these anymore does it just seem markdown as ai generated is
552
that my problem here cool i passed 100 human written yeah very likely all of these were written by ai
553
which is annoying because i have had not great luck with ai written stuff i'm amazed
554
that the unslop one is allegedly ai though because
555
that skill read very easily and was very dense
556
and well written i will say regardless of
557
if they're both ai generated i find p stack writing to be a lot more readable
558
and also the behaviors from these skills to be a lot
559
more applicable for my day -to -day the arena one has been super fun fan out
560
and parallel attempts at the same task read every candidate
561
end -to -end pick the strongest as the base graph the
562
best ideas from the others into it verify the synthesized results
563
this has been a very fun skill for those of us who are token burners
564
because we have a bunch of usage to get through started
565
to do list with one entry per phase before launching anything the arena runs autonomously
566
and the list keeps phases from silently disappearing frame fan out cross judge pick graft verify
567
then descriptions of each phase surprisingly little text for how much
568
this does like this one skill has cost me hundreds of dollars of inference
569
because it just does the same thing multiple times this write -up is very much tied to cursor specifically
570
which is the biggest issue with p stack i honestly would be pumped
571
if somebody like cloned all the p stack skills in a generic not cursor specific way
572
because there's so much gold in here
573
but a handful of these are just a little too cursory
574
she did also pull the bro skill from uh i believe it was originally dylan mulroy the effect
575
and functional programming javascript guy restate your last message stop using jargon
576
and speak coherently state it more simply
577
and concisely like one human talking to another i think
578
this is basically identical to wait what yep pretty much identical also one of the few
579
that potato has is disable model invocation, which is interesting.
580
She normally just lets the model do its thing.
581
Blast Radius is awesome, too.
582
I've been using this one a ton.
583
Find what a change breaks somewhere else before it ships.
584
Use Blast Radius of X.
585
What could this break?
586
Or reviewing a small diff that you don't trust.
587
Compare your companion to how and why.
588
How tells you what the code does.
589
Why tells you why it's shaped that way.
590
Blast Radius tells you what it breaks somewhere else.
591
I know this calls out you can't trust your own write -up, specifically saying that the history of this thread is not trustworthy
592
so don't hand back the write -up find the one
593
or two facts the whole thing depends on
594
and prove them by running code this one is great
595
and has cop a couple things that would have been miserable
596
if i didn't have it it also calls out
597
that it should write the response through unslop to make sure
598
that it's not a mess this is great i didn't want this to be like a one
599
or the other thing where it's like pstack versus pocock skills i didn't intend for it to be
600
that at all
601
but i am much more philosophically aligned with what potato is cooking over here oh yeah
602
she also has the show me your work skill
603
which is really cool
604
if you ever want to understand why an agent did something
605
to like keep track of what's going on keep a reviewable decision trail for long running
606
and unattended work a tsv log with one row per decision what why evidence
607
and result local by default commit it
608
when a reviewer needs the trail to trust the result use for slash show me your work, autonomous or multi -phase runs,
609
or work a human reviews after stepping away.
610
Gives it a format on how to log its work
611
and its decision -making process all in a simple TSV format so that it's easy to read and do in other things.
612
One row is one decision or checkpoint.
613
If it doesn't fit one line, the decision isn't crisp yet.
614
Append only.
615
A wrong call gets a new row that supersedes it.
616
Prefer evidence produced by committed scripts over handmade one -offs so a reviewer can rerun it.
617
Interesting.
618
This one seems really cool, actually.
619
I'm going to play with this more later.
620
This video is supposed to be an overview, but what you're getting instead is my actual process I did pretty much exactly everything you're seeing here
621
but with slightly less depth a few days ago
622
and that's how I found the cool skills that I did find
623
and this is what you should be doing as well you shouldn't just blindly install a bunch of shit
624
when you could take the time to read the things
625
that map up to the work you do and how you do things
626
and pull over the parts that you actually want
627
and it all should start with something small like grab the one you like.
628
I think everyone should have unswap at this point.
629
This skill has fundamentally changed my willingness to read the things that my agents say to me.
630
It's been great.
631
God, this video could be hours long or it could be a 45 second short.
632
It could be a lot of different things.
633
It isn't quite what I expected it or wanted it to be, but I hope you can get some good takeaways from it still.
634
The first thing you should do is you should grab your agent
635
and you should open it up and tell it about pstack
636
and tell it about matpocock skills and ask it to look through them
637
and then look through your histories
638
and figure out what makes sense based on what you do maybe you should install the unslop skill before
639
that though because then you'll actually want to read the responses you get afterwards you should look through
640
that you should read the markdown for the skills you're installing before you install them then you should decide
641
which ones you want you can tell your agent to set it up you can do a single repo
642
that represents all your skills like I do.
643
I think it's really powerful.
644
You have a lot of options here for how you choose to manage all of this.
645
But you should be managing it.
646
You shouldn't be blindly copying someone else's setup.
647
You shouldn't be running commands that install 500 skills you don't know anything about.
648
You should take this opportunity to refine your toolbox based on what you see working for others
649
and what you try setting up yourself.
650
You should, based on your own history and your own usage, make subtle adjustments and changes.
651
And you shouldn't be scared of editing these files.
652
I've noticed a lot of people are scared of opening up their clod files
653
and like the dot clod and the dot agents directory on their machines.
654
That's silly.
655
And you have to get over it because there is so much cool shit you can do.
656
The moments you start digging in and playing with these things, you got to be willing to edit those files.
657
I joke now that the only time I open my code editor is to edit markdown files, but like it's barely a joke at this point.
658
It's markdown files and environment variables at this point.
659
And it has helped a ton.
660
It's one of the biggest shifts that has allowed me to do way more parallel agent work.
661
It's a huge part of why I was able to ship so many PRs with so little breakage over the last weekend.
662
The way I work is really different now.
663
And it's largely because I took the time to go deeper in these directories
664
and pull together skills for myself and others that make sense for the work that I do.
665
And I hope this inspires you to go do the same.
666
Explore these collections of skills people have published.
667
Don't blindly install them.
668
Poke around at them.
669
Try them out.
670
Pull the parts you like.
671
Ignore the parts you don't.
672
Play.
673
I think I've said all I have to here.
674
There's some really good stuff in Matt's skills and even more good stuff in Potato's skills.
675
Check both out and maybe make some of your own too.
676
I'm curious how this affects your workflows.
677
Let me know.
678
And until next time, peace, nerds.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “So I tried Matt's skills..”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: skill, agent, code. This video has 678 sentences and 7604 words to shadow. The speech runs for 38:21. The speaker talks fast, about 198 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 80% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| skill noun | /skɪl/ | A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate. |
| grill noun | /ɡɹɪl/ | A grating; a grid of wire or a sheet of material with a pattern of holes or slots, usually used to protect something while allowing the passage of air and… |
| doc noun | /dɑk/ | A doctor. |
| dash noun | /ˈdæʃ/ | Any of the following symbols: ‒ (figure dash), – (en dash), — (em dash), or ― (horizontal bar). |
| install verb | /ɪnˈstɔl/ | To connect, set up or prepare something for use |
| wizard noun | /ˈwɪzɚd/ | Someone, usually male, who uses (or has skill with) magic, mystic items, and magical and mystical practices. |
| thread noun | /ˈθɹɛd/ | A cord formed by spinning or twisting together textile fibers or filaments into one or more continuous strands, typically used in needlework. |
| potato noun | /pəˈteɪ.təʊ/ | The edible starchy tuber of the plant species Solanum tuberosum. |
| architecture noun | /ˈɑː.kɪˌtɛk.t͡ʃə/ | The art and science of designing and managing the construction of buildings and other structures, particularly if they are well proportioned and decorated. |
| parallel adjective | /ˈpæ.ɹəˌlɛl/ | Equally distant from one another at all points. |
| pasta noun | /ˈpɑ.stə/ | Dough made from wheat and water and sometimes mixed with egg and formed into various shapes; often sold in dried form and typically boiled for eating. |
| prompt verb | /pɹɑmpt/ | To lead (someone) toward what they should say or do. |
| installed verb | /ɪnˈstɔːld/ | readied for use |
| script noun | /skɹɪpt/ | A writing; a written document. |
| blast noun | /blæst/ | A violent gust of wind (in windy weather) or apparent wind (around a moving vehicle). |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| set up verb | /ˌsɛt ˈʌp/ | To make ready for use. |
| call out verb | To specify, especially in detail. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| write up verb | /ˈɹaɪ̯t ˌʌp/ | To produce by writing. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| follow up verb | To take further actions remaining after an event; to continue, revisit, or persist; especially, to maintain communication or verify. | |
| look through verb | To take a view of the contents of; search in, either with the eyes or by hand. | |
| break up verb | To break or separate into pieces. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I am sure you're familiar with.
- Let's be honest with ourselves.
- Don't call me out like this.
- Do I have this one?
- Wait, what's another one that I'm really excited about?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been eyeing · I've been using · have been enjoying |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've interacted · I've often called · has continued |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was put · should be ignored · is shared |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | builds, which makes · machines, which were · skill, which is |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 135 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, don't, I've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: thread /ˈθɹɛd/, thumbnail /ˈθʌm.neɪl/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: dash /ˈdæʃ/, speculation /ˌspɛk.jəˈleɪ.ʃən/, instruction /ɪnˈstɹʌkʃən/, beneficial /ˌbɛn.ɪˈfɪʃ.əl/, cache /kæʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: architecture /ˈɑː.kɪˌtɛk.t͡ʃə/, speculation /ˌspɛk.jəˈleɪ.ʃən/, directory /dɪˈɹɛktəɹi/, autonomous /ɔˈtɑnəməs/, vocabulary /vəˈkæb.jə.lə.ɹi/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like skill, grill, doc.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.