Ask Matt — Ask It First When You Don’t Know Which Skill to Use

Skill Overview

Ask Matt is a skill-routing navigator: when you’re unsure which skill or workflow applies to your current situation, it helps you identify the right one. It only makes recommendations; it does not execute tasks on your behalf.

Applicable Scenarios

1. You have an idea but don’t know where to start You have a request that isn’t fully fleshed out and aren’t sure whether to begin with interviews, write a specification, or start coding immediately. Ask Matt directs you to the entry point of the main process, “idea → ship,” and uses two criteria—“Can all questions be answered through conversation?” and “Does this need to span multiple sessions?”—to tell you whether to proceed with /grill-with-docs, /prototype, or directly with /implement.

2. You’re stuck and want to know which branch to start You have a pile of bug reports and requests, a recurring bug whose cause you can’t identify, or a new project so large that the path forward is unclear. These don’t belong to the main process; they enter through on-ramps. Ask Matt points you to /triage, /diagnosing-bugs, or /wayfinder, respectively, and explains where each one reconnects with the main process.

3. You’ve reached the end of a phase and aren’t sure what to do with the context A piece of work is finished. Should you continue, clear the context, compress it, or hand it off? This is the most ambiguous decision in the entire skill map. Ask Matt presents five options at phase boundaries—continue, /clear, /handoff, sub-agent, and /compact—explains what each option actually provides, and points out that “continue” is the first option you should rule out.

Core Features

1. Routes by structure, not keyword matching It organizes the skills in the repository into four levels: one main process (idea → ship), two on-ramps (triage, diagnosing-bugs, and wayfinder), several standalone skills (grill-me, prototype, research, wizard, etc.), and a layer of foundational vocabulary (domain-modeling, codebase-design). You describe your situation, and it places you on one of these paths.

2. Provides the complete path, not just a single skill name For example, the main process explains the entire route at once: refine the idea with /grill-with-docs → when you need a runnable answer, use /handoff to switch to /prototype and back → for work spanning multiple sessions, use /to-spec, then /to-tickets to break it into tickets with blocking relationships → run /implement for each ticket (internally driven by /tdd, followed by /code-review at the end). You get the entire route, not an isolated step.

3. Actively clarifies each skill’s boundaries It doesn’t just tell you what to use; it also tells you what not to use: /triage handles only issues you did not create; tickets produced by /to-tickets are already agent-ready, so do not run them through triage again; /wayfinder is reserved for genuinely large projects with unclear paths, and it hands off to /to-spec rather than starting implementation directly; /grill-me is only for use when there is no working directory—if a repository exists, always use /grill-with-docs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Will Ask Matt trigger automatically?

No. This skill is marked disable-model-invocation: true, so the model will not invoke it on its own. You must explicitly call it with /ask-matt. This is intentional: routing is a deliberate request for help, not behavior inferred by guesswork.

In the main process, when should I take a detour to build a prototype?

The criterion is: “Can this question be answered through conversation?” If a question requires something to be run before it can be answered—whether the state model feels intuitive, the business logic works, or what the interface looks like—take a detour to /prototype. Prototypes live in their own directory, so use /handoff in both directions to bridge the two: hand off a file, open a new session to build the prototype, then hand the conclusions back and link to them from the original idea thread.

At a phase boundary, how do I choose between Continue, /clear, /handoff, and /compact?

First rule out “continue”—its primary cost is consuming first-hand information, so it is the first of the five options to question. Distinguish among the remaining options based on your needs: use /clear when the next task is unrelated to the current context; use /handoff only when changing execution environments (a new harness, a new directory, or handing work to a colleague) or branching off a side task midway—it provides portability; use a sub-agent to send a clearly bounded task into an independent window and receive a separate report; /compact is the default, compressing the current context and using it to start a new session. It belongs at the bottom of the decision tree, not as the first option you reach for.

How does it relate to skills such as /grill-with-docs and /tdd?

Ask Matt is an index, not a replacement. It does not produce specifications, write code, or perform reviews; it only sends you where you need to go. In addition, this skill set assumes that you have already configured an issue tracker, triage labels, and a documentation structure. If you haven’t, run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once first; otherwise, subsequent workflows will lack the infrastructure they depend on.