✨ feat(workflow): adopt Matt Pocock ticket workflow
Replace the Superpowers plan pipeline with grill-with-docs, specs, local tickets, and ticket-native execution. BREAKING CHANGE: Remove the legacy Plan CLI, prompt templates, and Superpowers skills.
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# Phase boundaries
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A **phase** is a chunk of work inside a session — the grilling, the implementation, the QA. The definition is fuzzy on purpose: a phase ends when you think *"ok, we're done with that"*.
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The **phase boundary** is the gap between two phases, and it is the only place this decision belongs. Mid-phase there is no decision to make — continue, or split the work that's left into subagents. Compacting mid-phase makes the agent lose the thread.
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## The five options
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| Option | What it does |
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| ------------ | --------------------------------------------------------------- |
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| **Continue** | Stay in the session. No context switch at all. |
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| **`/clear`** | Empty the context window and start from nothing. |
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| **`/handoff`** | Write a portable markdown file and seed a session anywhere with it. |
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| **Subagent** | Send the task to its own context window and get a report back. |
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| **`/compact`** | Compress this context and seed a fresh session with the summary. |
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## The tree
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Work top to bottom at the boundary. The first **yes** wins.
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**1. Can you continue in this session?** Two things make the answer yes: the next phase needs this phase as a **primary source**, or you have enough [smart zone](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/smart-zone) left (~150k tokens) for the next phase to fit. Grilling → implementation is the standard yes: the implementation wants the reasoning verbatim, not a summary of it. Continue costs nothing and loses nothing, so rule it out before anything else.
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**2. Is the context irrelevant to what comes next?** Is everything in this session — the exploration, the decisions, the dead ends — disposable? If so, **`/clear`**. It is the cheapest move on the board: it takes no time and hands back the whole window. `/clear` also isn't terminal — the old session stays resumable.
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The cost of getting this wrong is one-way. Clear a *relevant* context and you lose the **why** behind what you built, and no amount of reading the diff back gets it returned.
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**3. Do you need to hand off?** `/handoff` is narrow. You need it only when you are:
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- swapping to a **new harness** (Claude → Codex),
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- moving to a **new directory** or repo,
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- sending the work to a **colleague**,
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- or forking a side task you found **mid-phase** without derailing what you're doing.
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That list is the whole clause. What `/handoff` buys is **portability** — a file that travels. If nothing is travelling, you don't need it.
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**4. Can the task be done AFK?** Is it scoped tightly enough to run with you away from the keyboard, no steering? Then send it to a **subagent** and leave this session untouched. Automated review is the standard case: the agent reads the diff and reports, and you aren't needed while it does.
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**5. Otherwise, `/compact`.** Relevant context, same harness, same directory, and you need to stay in the loop — this is where the tree lands, and it lands here often. Pass it an instruction (`/compact we're going to QA this area`) so the summary keeps what the next phase needs.
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`/compact` is the **default, not the first reach**. It sits at the bottom because the four questions above it are all cheaper or more precise. The failure mode when people start here is a fresh session that is confidently wrong about a decision the summary flattened.
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## Primary and secondary sources
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Every move except **Continue** turns a **primary source** into a **secondary source** — the session as it happened, replaced by a summary of it. The trade is always the same shape:
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| Source | Information | Noise | Room to move |
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| --------------------------------- | ----------- | ----- | ------------ |
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| Primary (Continue) | Full | Lots | Little |
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| Secondary (`/compact`, `/handoff`) | Lossy | Less | Lots |
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This is why question 1 comes first. You only pay the lossiness when staying costs more than it saves.
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## These are judgement calls
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The questions are not objective — each has taste in it, and the same boundary can go two ways on two days. The value is in asking them **in order**, at the boundary rather than in the middle of the work.
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Vendored
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---
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name: ask-matt
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description: Ask which skill or flow fits your situation. A router over the skills in this repo.
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disable-model-invocation: true
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---
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# Ask Matt
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You don't remember every skill, so ask.
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A **flow** is a path through the skills. Most paths run along one **main flow**, and two **on-ramps** merge onto it. Everything else is standalone, or a vocabulary layer that runs underneath.
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## The main flow: idea → ship
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The route most work travels. You have an idea and want it built.
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1. **`/grill-with-docs`** — sharpen the idea by interview. Start here whenever you are **working in a working directory**: it's stateful, retaining what it learns in `CONTEXT.md` and ADRs. (No working directory? Use `/grill-me` — see Standalone. Both run the same `/grilling` primitive; `grill-with-docs` is the one that leaves a paper trail, which makes it the better of the two whenever a repo is there to leave it in.)
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2. **Branch — can you settle every question in conversation?** If a question needs a runnable answer (state, business logic, a UI you have to see), detour through a prototype, bridged by **`/handoff`** in both directions (a prototype lives in its own directory, which is exactly what `/handoff` is for — see Phase boundaries):
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- **`/handoff`** out, then open a fresh session against that file,
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- **`/prototype`** to answer the question with throwaway code,
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- **`/handoff`** back what you learned, and reference it from the original idea thread.
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3. **Branch — is this a multi-session build?**
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- **Yes** → **`/to-spec`** (turn the thread into a spec), then **`/to-tickets`** to split it into tracer-bullet tickets, each declaring its **blocking edges**. On a local tracker that's one file per ticket under `.scratch/<feature>/issues/`, worked blockers-first by hand; on a real tracker the edges become native blocking links, so any ticket whose blockers are done can be grabbed — kick off **`/implement`** per ticket, **`/clear`ing context between each one**. Each ticket is self-contained, so the last one's context is disposable.
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- **No** → **`/implement`** right here, in the same context window.
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Either way, **`/implement`** builds each issue by driving **`/tdd`** internally — one red-green slice at a time — then closes out by running **`/code-review`**, a two-axis review (Standards + Spec) of the diff, before committing. Reach for **`/tdd`** on its own when you just want to build a concrete behaviour test-first without a full spec, and **`/code-review`** on its own whenever you want to review a branch or PR against a fixed point.
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### Context hygiene
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Keep steps 1–3 in **one unbroken context window** — don't compact or clear until after `/to-tickets` — so the grilling, spec, and tickets all build on the same thinking. Each `/implement` then starts fresh, working from the ticket.
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The limit on this is the **[smart zone](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/smart-zone)**: the window (~150k tokens on state-of-the-art models) within which the model still reasons sharply. If a session approaches it before `/to-tickets`, don't push on degraded — `/compact` at the nearest phase boundary and carry on (see Phase boundaries).
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## On-ramps
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A starting situation that generates work, then merges onto the main flow.
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- **Bugs and requests piling up** → **`/triage`**. It moves issues through triage roles and produces agent-ready issues, which **`/implement`** later picks up.
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Triage is only for issues **you didn't create** — bug reports, incoming feature requests, anything that arrives raw. Tickets that `/to-tickets` produced are already agent-ready, so **don't triage them**.
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- **Something's broken** → **`/diagnosing-bugs`**. For the hard ones: the bug that resists a first glance, the intermittent flake, the regression that crept in between two known-good states. It refuses to theorise until it has a **tight feedback loop** — one command that already goes red on *this* bug — then fixes with a regression test. Its post-mortem hands off to **`/improve-codebase-architecture`** when the real finding is that there's no good seam to lock the bug down.
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- **A huge, foggy effort — a greenfield project or a huge feature build, too big for one session** → **`/wayfinder`**, the most cognitively demanding flow here. When the way from here to the destination isn't visible yet, it charts a **shared map** of **decision tickets** on the issue tracker and resolves them one at a time — producing **decisions, not deliverables** — until the fog is pushed back and the way is clear. Where **`/grill-with-docs`** sharpens an idea you can hold in one session, wayfinder is for the idea you can't — and it's slower and denser, so save it for exactly that, never a well-scoped feature.
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When the map clears, **it hands off, it doesn't build**: merge onto the main flow at **`/to-spec`**, which collapses the map's linked decisions into a buildable plan, then `/to-tickets` and `/implement` as usual. Looping the map straight into `/implement` skips that collapse and throws the linked detail away — go straight to `/implement` only when the effort turned out genuinely small.
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## Codebase health
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Not feature work — upkeep.
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- **`/improve-codebase-architecture`** — run whenever you have a spare moment to keep the codebase good for agents to operate in. It surfaces **deepening opportunities**; picking one _generates an idea_ you can take into the main flow at `/grill-with-docs`. It's the survey that finds the candidates; **`/codebase-design`** (below) is the bench you design the chosen one on.
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## Vocabulary underneath
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Two model-invoked references that run *beneath* the other skills — each the single source of truth for its vocabulary. Reach for them directly when the **words**, not the process, are the problem; or let the skills above pull them in.
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- **`/domain-modeling`** — sharpen the project's *domain* language: challenge a fuzzy term, resolve an overloaded word ("account" doing three jobs), record a hard-to-reverse decision as an ADR. It's the active discipline `/grill-with-docs` drives to keep `CONTEXT.md` a clean glossary.
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- **`/codebase-design`** — the deep-module vocabulary (module, interface, depth, seam, adapter, leverage, locality) for designing a module's *shape*: a lot of behaviour behind a small interface at a clean seam. `/tdd` and `/improve-codebase-architecture` both speak it.
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## Phase boundaries
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A **phase** is a chunk of work inside a session — the grilling, the implementation, the QA. At the **boundary** between two of them you have five options, and picking between them is the fuzziest decision in this whole map:
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- **Continue** — stay put. Costs nothing, loses nothing.
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- **`/clear`** — empty the window, when nothing here matters to what's next.
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- **`/handoff`** — write a portable markdown file. Narrow: only for a **new harness**, a **new directory**, a **colleague**, or forking a side task **mid-phase**. What it buys is portability.
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- **Subagent** — send a tightly-scoped task to its own window and get a report back.
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- **`/compact`** — compress this context and seed a fresh session with it. The **default**, at the bottom of the tree rather than the first reach.
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Read [PHASE-BOUNDARIES.md](PHASE-BOUNDARIES.md) for the ordered tree — the five questions, the reasoning behind each branch, and why the primary-source cost makes **Continue** the one to rule out first. Make the decision **at** a boundary; mid-phase, continue or split the rest into subagents.
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## Standalone
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Off the main flow entirely.
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- **`/grill-me`** — the same relentless interview as `/grill-with-docs`, but **stateless**: it saves nothing locally and builds no `CONTEXT.md`. Reach for it when you are **not working in a working directory** — sharpening a plan, a design, a piece of writing, anything with no repo under it. If you are in a working directory, use `/grill-with-docs` instead: it runs the same interview and leaves a paper trail, so it is strictly the better one.
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- **`/grilling`** — the interview primitive itself: rounds, the frontier, facts are the agent's job and decisions are yours. `/grill-me` and `/grill-with-docs` are the two named ways in, and `/triage`, `/wayfinder` and `/improve-codebase-architecture` all run it internally. Reach for it directly only when you want the interview with no wrapper around it.
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- **`/resolving-merge-conflicts`** — work an in-progress merge or rebase conflict hunk by hunk, resolving by **intent** traced to each side's primary source rather than by picking lines, then finish the operation. It never runs `--abort`. Standalone and off every flow: reach for it when you are already mid-conflict.
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- **`/prototype`** — a small, throwaway program that answers one design question: does this state model feel right, or what should this UI look like. Throwaway is a constraint on how the code is written, not a promise to destroy it: the answer folds into the real code, and the prototype itself is kept as a **primary source** on a `prototype/<name>` branch out of main, pointed at from the implementation issue. It's the detour in step 2 of the main flow, but reach for it any time a design question is hard to settle on paper.
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- **`/research`** — delegate reading legwork to a **background agent**: it investigates a question against **primary sources**, then leaves a cited Markdown file in the repo. Keep working while it reads. The file it produces is something to take *into* the main flow at `/grill-with-docs` — research feeds the thinking, it doesn't replace it.
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- **`/to-questionnaire`** — when the thing blocking you isn't in your head or the codebase but in **someone else's**, this writes them a questionnaire to fill in. It's the inverse of `/grill-me`: instead of interviewing you about the subject, it interviews you about the **send** — who it's going to, what you need back — and aims the questions at the gap. What comes back is material for `/grill-with-docs` or `/to-spec`.
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- **`/wizard`** — for the steps only a **human** can take: provisioning infrastructure, setting up credentials or CI secrets, clicking through an unfamiliar third-party dashboard, running a one-off migration or cutover. It generates an interactive bash script that opens each URL, captures each value, and writes it into `.env` and GitHub secrets — so the procedure stops being something you re-explain to an agent every time. Model-invoked, so the agent reaches for it the moment it hits a wall only you can pass. If the agent could just do it itself, it should; this is for where a human is genuinely in the loop.
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- **`/wait-what`** — the corrective for a message that didn't land. Use it mid-conversation, inside any other skill, and the agent re-pitches what it just said with the context you were missing, in plain English, using the `CONTEXT.md` vocabulary. It works after the fact; `/grill-with-docs` is the upfront cure, because a shared language agreed early is what stops the jargon arriving at all.
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- **`/teach`** — learn a concept over multiple sessions, using the current directory as a stateful workspace.
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- **`/writing-for-agents`** — reference for writing documents agents consume: skills, AGENTS.md, pointed-at docs.
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## Precondition
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**`/setup-matt-pocock-skills`** — run before your first engineering flow to configure the issue tracker, triage labels, and doc layout the other skills assume. Custom issue trackers also work.
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interface:
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display_name: "Ask Matt"
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short_description: "Find the right skill or workflow"
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policy:
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allow_implicit_invocation: false
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