25 agent skills to improve your workflow in GitHub Copilot | Matt Pocock | GitHub Copilot Day

By GitHub

Categories: Product, Tools

Summary

GitHub Copilot's 259K-star skills repo enables developers to ship work of any size by pre-aligning with AI agents through 'grill-with-docs'—a technique that asks clarifying questions before execution, dramatically reducing misaligned output and reaching shared understanding faster.

Key Takeaways

  1. Use 'grill-with-docs' skill to align with agents before they execute work. This pre-session questioning phase prevents agents from producing unwanted outputs and is described as 'absolutely essential' for reliable results.
  2. Organize work using GitHub Issues tied to automated agent loops and labels rather than storing requirements in the repo itself. This enables direct agent triggering and better coordination of changes.
  3. Structure agent interactions iteratively—explore phase first, then questions, then implementation. The 'frontier of questions' expands slowly, achieving alignment faster through this staged approach.
  4. Enhance PR documentation with Mermaid diagrams and focused diffs generated by skills like 'show-me'. Visuals help teams understand complex changes and maintain clarity on data hierarchy and relationships.
  5. Leverage the skills ecosystem (259K stars) to compose multi-agent workflows for complex tasks. Different skills handle different phases: grilling, exploring, implementing, and explaining.

Related topics

Transcript Excerpt

I'm extremely delighted to be here. And I've somehow come into possession of the most or the second most popular skills repo in the world. I'm coming to you from sunny Oxfordshire right now and I'm gonna introduce you to the skills repo and also maybe look at a couple of new things that are coming to the skills repo and how you can apply those in GitHub Copilot. So first of all, let me show you the repo. We are up to around 259K stars, which is fairly wild to me. I never really thought we would get there. And the place we're gonna start is in the main flow here. So the idea of these skills is you can really ship any size of work that you want to. And the place we pretty much always start is with this grill-with-docs skill. For those who haven't used my skills before, this is essentially a …

More from GitHub