Best agent skills for requirements and specs
Agent skills for turning vague intent into explicit, reviewable engineering work.
How to choose
Use Matt’s grilling workflows when the problem is unresolved and shared language is the bottleneck. Use Addy’s interview and spec sequence when a team needs a repeatable path from raw idea to capability-oriented specification. Superpowers’ brainstorming adds a Socratic design sign-off before planning starts.
Grill Me
Relentlessly interviews the user until every reachable branch of a decision is resolved.
Our take: The clearest reason to install Matt’s collection. Grill Me turns vague intent into a visible decision tree and refuses to let the agent silently fill gaps, which directly addresses the most expensive failure in agentic coding: building the wrong thing quickly.
Grill With Docs
Interrogates a design while building shared vocabulary and recording decisions as it goes.
Our take: Grill With Docs improves on a normal requirements interview by turning resolved language and architectural choices into durable project context. That makes later sessions shorter and reduces inconsistent naming across both code and agent explanations.
To Spec
Synthesizes the current conversation into a specification without restarting discovery.
Brainstorming
Turns a rough idea into an approved design through Socratic questions, chunked review, and explicit sign-off before any code.
Our take: The entry skill is the reason the rest of the methodology works. Brainstorming refuses to let the agent jump into code, classifies how much process a request needs, and drives the idea through context, refinement, a chunked design, and explicit human sign-off before anything is planned or built.
Interview Me
Extracts underlying intent through one-question-at-a-time requirements interviews.
Our take: Interview Me is Addy’s strongest entry point for vague work. It asks one question at a time until underlying intent is clear, creating a measured human checkpoint before the broader lifecycle begins.
Spec-Driven Development
Creates a capability-oriented specification before substantial implementation begins.
Our take: A strong bridge between discovery and implementation. It expresses a change as independently testable capabilities, making large requests easier to review, sequence, and hand to agents without turning the specification into implementation trivia.
Planning and Task Breakdown
Turns a clear specification into ordered, testable, and parallelizable tasks.