First of all, I'm going to declare that this is written with no AI help. This should be a 3 minutes read.
Hey internet, I haven't published anything in 1 year. The last I wrote was something about Flutter related problem. Let's write some back story first. As much as I hate to admit it, I was a sloppy coder when I use agentic IDE like Cursor. I didn't know how to utilize the full potential of AI models.
What I did was lazy and no brainer. Give the model a prompt to do this or that, let it plan and barely read the plan and let it implement. After the implementation, I check again it's not exactly what I wanted. The work quality was bad and I frequently had to step in and do the coding myself which was slowing the workflow quite a lot. This went on for 5-6 months until I realize something was seriously wrong with my workflow.
I know the context of the business, what to look for, where the business logic is, who to contact if blocked, which package to use, how to implement it but my workflow was still slow. Until a few months ago I found a game changer skill which is quite popular already but for those who's still under a rock like me I would like to introduce you to /matt-pocock
skill which you can check it out [here](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills).
Let me simplify it for you and keep it no brainer as much as possible because I like to keep it dead simple. It grills you to the bone for the feature that you want to implement by recommending you bunch of options and which is the most optimized and allow you to customize the implementation to your liking, records the decisions, write test seams (test seams are codes that can be replaced with fake/mock dependency for testing), directly implement the feature after grilling then it does test and review the whole thing by itself.
Here are the skills I use in my everyday workflow:
/grill-with-docs
: grill you about your feature and come up with a plan/to-spec
: break down what you've discussed with AI into a proper specification/to-tickets
: break the specification into smaller tickets /implement
: start the implementation from the tickets or directly implement without the spec or tickets/handoff
: wrap up all the discussion into a small digestable markdown file to feed it into a fresh sessionFor a better workflow, you'll need only these 5 skills to run when you're implementing features no matter how big or small.
Here's what I always do:
/grill-with-docs
to grill me about the feature that I want to implement. /to-spec
to make it into a proper specification. If my feature is small I would directly run /implement
without having the need to run /to-spec
unless it's a big feature/to-tickets
after you run /to-spec
/handoff
to keep the context window small which is 130k-ish (This is the smart zone where the model is sharp and smart). /implement
to implement the ticketsKeep in mind that for every tickets after you run /implement
, please start a new session for the next ticket to keep the model sharp.
After a few months of using this, I have noticed that my implementation has little to no bug or fault and I enjoyed doing agentic coding much more than before. My work simply become much better and the quality of the work is great. Give it a try and let me know.