Matt Pocock (2 blogmarks)

Addy Osmani shares the idea to “let AI interview you”:

I’m about to start a project. Interview me until you have 95% confidence about what I actually want - not what I think I should want.

This is similar to Matt Pocock’s “Grill Me” Claude Code skill:

Interview the user relentlessly about a plan or design until reaching shared understanding, resolving each branch of the decision tree. Use when user wants to stress-test a plan, get grilled on their design, or mentions "grill me".

One of the first tips from this video that jumped out at me was one of the first rules that shows up in Matt Pocock's system CLAUDE.md file.

• In all interactions and commit messages, be extremely concise and sacrifice grammar for the sake of concision.

My initial experience with Claude Code is that it is verbose, excessively so. To counteract that a bit, adding this as a top-level rule to Claude's memory seems very useful.

Another thing that Matt recommends having in CLAUDE.md as part of any planning mode work is:

• At the end of each plan, give me a list of unresolved questions to answer, if any. Make the questions extremely concise. Sacrifice grammar for the sake of concision.

This gives the human a chance to clarify things and make adjustments before finalizing the plan.

Later as Claude Code gets to the end of writing the first pass of a plan, Matt gets the sense that executing on the entire plan is going to completely overrun the context window. So, he instructs CC to:

make the plan multi-phase