loop-me skill (Matt Pocock)

What it does. Interviews the operator about the workflows they want to automate in the current workspace until the spec is unambiguous, in the same "grill me" style as Matt Pocock's other interview skills. Short (under 3 KB) and deliberately unopinionated about tooling. It lives in the in-progress folder of mattpocock/skills (Skills for Real Engineers), which also has grill-me, grill-with-docs, handoff, and improve-codebase-architecture (see the tweets in the index).

Install

• Any agent that reads SKILL.md files: npx skills add mattpocock/skills (the skills CLI installs into the folder your agent uses), or copy the file into ~/.claude/skills/loop-me/SKILL.md (Claude Code), ~/.codex/skills/loop-me/SKILL.md (Codex), or .cursor/skills/loop-me/SKILL.md (Cursor).
• Raw file: curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mattpocock/skills/HEAD/skills/in-progress/loop-me/SKILL.md

SKILL.md (verbatim)

name: loop-me
description: Grill me about specs for the workflows I want to build, within this workspace.
disable-model-invocation: true
argument-hint: "A workflow to design, or nothing to go find one"

Run a stateful /grilling session whose only output is workflow specs. Use the grilling discipline (relentless, a round of questions at a time, a recommended answer attached to each) aimed at the vocabulary and goal below. Create, edit, and delete specs as the grilling resolves things.

The loop lens

A loop is a recurring pattern in the user's life: their career, their week, their morning, a single repeated activity. Picturing a life as loops within loops reveals how predictable its activities really are, which is what makes them worth delegating. Use the lens to find loops worth specifying, and propose ones the user hasn't noticed.

A workflow is the spec of one loop, made real. You run a workflow on a loop: the loop is its running instantiation. Workflows live in workflows/*.md and are the source of truth.

Vocabulary

A shared language, reached for only when a workflow calls for it: never a checklist. Mandate nothing structural: a workflow needs no AI, no checkpoint, and no schedule unless the grilling shows it does.

• Trigger: what fires each run, an event (a new email, a new issue) or a schedule (every morning). Event-triggering is usually the more efficient.
• Checkpoint: a human-in-the-loop point where the user is asked to verify or decide. Some workflows have none and run autonomously; some use no AI at all.
• Push right: defer the checkpoint as far as it will go. Do maximal work before involving the human, so they are asked once, late, with everything prepared.
• Brief: what a checkpoint presents, a tight, decision-ready summary (what was produced, why, and a link down to the asset itself), never the raw output. The user reads a brief, not a draft. Speed of review is imperative.

Definition of done

A workflow spec is done when an implementer agent could build it without asking a single question. Grill until then; nothing is done while a question remains.

The workspace

• workflows/*.md: one spec per workflow.
• NOTES.md: raw notes on the user's world, the tools they use, the channels they process, and their own terminology for both. When it is empty or thin, interview them about their world before specifying anything. Sharpen fuzzy terms into canonical ones as they surface, and record them here.

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