Brought to You By:
• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable
• Linear – the product development system for teams and agents
• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.
—
Why is the “grill-me” skill so popular, and why does its creator swear by the importance of software fundamentals? Matt Pocock created this widely-used skill – and many others – alongside being an educator, content creator, and engineer. His latest course is AI Hero, and he previously created the Total TypeScript course that generated more than $2.5 million in sales.
In this episode, Matt and I discuss his unconventional path from working as a voice teacher to becoming a developer and going all-in on technical education. He reveals how communication skills helped him break into tech, why he took an unusual three-days-a-week contract at Vercel, and how he built Total TypeScript through workshops, courses, and a lot of free content.
We also explore “strategic coding,” and how he uses skills like “grill me” and “wayfinder” to plan, delegate, and course-correct with AI agents. Matt explains his “day shift” and “night shift” approach, why splitting context up can keep agents in their “smart zone,” and how concepts from classic software engineering books can guide agents to do better. In this episode, there’s also local versus cloud workflows, whether agents need TDD, how AI is changing the ways that engineers learn the fundamentals, and why humans are still essential in teaching.
Timestamps
Intro
How Matt got into tech
How Matt got into open source
Joining Vercel
Total TypeScript
AI’s impact on technical education
Building reusable skills for AI coding agents
The “smart zone” vs the “dumb zone”
The wayfinder skill
Why agents excel at software engineering
“Leading words”
Learning the fundamentals
Local vs. cloud agents
Planning vs. course-correcting
TDD and agents
Living in the UK
Teaching: the human part
Advice for junior engineers
Gardeners and great engineers
Book recommendation
—
The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:
• The Philosophy of Software Design – with John Ousterhout
• Context engineering with Dex Horthy
• Are AI agents actually slowing us down?
• How Uber uses AI for development: inside look
—
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.
Get full access to The Pragmatic Engineer at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/subscribe
