One real build, start to finish
Build-along · ~30 min at your own keyboard
Every lesson so far trained one move. This one runs them in order on a real piece of your own work, because the moves only pay off together. Grill: the agent interviews you, one question at a time, until you agree on what you're building. Most bad builds start with a misunderstanding nobody surfaced. Spec: that agreement goes into a one-page document, written before any code. Tickets: the spec is cut into small pieces. Each one can be finished and checked on its own, and each is a thin slice that works end to end, not one layer of everything. Build: one ticket per fresh session, with the spec and that ticket as the context, and a check before the next ticket starts. Review: a new session that never saw the build reads the change against the spec and reports what is wrong. Then a short retro, so the next build goes better. The spec and the tickets are also your handoff: any new session can pick up from them, so a full context window never strands the work.
The long version: Building with AI ↗
Do this
0/7Checkpoints
- ▸You should now see a list of the grilling's questions with your answers.
- ▸You should now see a one-page spec saved in the project, with an out-of-scope line.
- ▸You should now see 3 to 6 tickets, each with its check.
- ▸You should now see every ticket marked done with the check that passed.
- ▸You should now see review findings from a new session, each fixed or answered.
The three ways this goes wrong
- You started building before the spec existed, just to see. — Stop and write the spec from what you learned. Throw the experiment away or treat it as ticket zero. The spec is what the review checks against.
- One ticket turned into most of the build. — Split it until each piece can be checked on its own in under an hour and does something a user could see.
- The review came back empty, or with only praise. — Run it in a session that never saw the build, give it the spec, and ask for the most serious problems first. A reviewer that helped write the code tends to agree with it.
Where these ideas come from: Grilling, Spec, The grill-me skill, His grill, spec, tickets and review skills, Clearing, Handoff artifact, Sycophancy (AI Hero dictionary; Matt Pocock's skills (MIT)). Paraphrased here.
Share what happened
Paste the spec (trimmed to the essentials), the ticket list with how each one was checked, the review findings with what you did about each, and your three retro lines.
Strip API keys, passwords, and tokens before you paste. Swap them for [KEY].
🔒 Don't paste confidential, personal-health, or payment info.