The 2 Skills Thomas Moen Can’t Live Without
This is a solo episode of the AI D2C WTF podcast a departure from the usual deep-dive guest interviews. Instead host, Thomas Moen goes practical and breaks down two dead-simple AI "skills" that he personally uses 10 to 15 times a day. A skill, as he explains, is just a markdown text file that Claude (or another AI agent) reads to follow a standard operating procedure, and the AI automatically knows when to invoke it.
The first skill is Grill Me, originally created by Matt Pocock and published on GitHub. It is only three sentences long and instructs the AI to interview you relentlessly about every aspect of a plan, one question at a time, until you reach a shared understanding, offering its recommended answer for each question. Though it was built for coding and development, the host has evolved it into a business and life tool. He shares how he and his business partner each ran Grill Me when deciding whether to hire a new head of agency. He surfaced 36 questions, his partner 17, and the exercise produced two markdown documents they compared to find the right path. He notes it works for anything from fixing weekly reports to deciding between a tent trip and a glamping trip.
The second skill is Handoff, also from Matt Pocock's library. It solves the context window problem. The host references the idea of a "smart zone" and a "dumb zone," where after roughly 200,000 to 300,000 tokens the AI starts to get confused and less reliable. When he feels a conversation slipping into the dumb zone, he invokes Handoff, which captures everything relevant from the current chat into a markdown file plus a short prompt that lets a fresh AI agent pick up exactly where the last one left off. The skill is about five sentences and includes instructions to save to a temp directory, reference artifacts by path rather than duplicating them, and redact sensitive information like API keys and passwords.
Websites and SaaS Products Mentioned
Claude (Anthropic) — the AI assistant the skills run on
Motion (motionapp.com) — creative analytics platform and episode sponsor
Slack — referenced as a place to receive an AI morning performance brief
Matt Pocock's skill library — the source for both the Grill Me and Handoff skills (shared via GitHub)
To connect with Andrew Foxwell reach him here Andrew@FoxwellDigital.com
To connect with Will Sartorious DM him here https://x.com/will_sartorius
To Connect mith Thomas Moen DM him here https://x.com/thomasmoen
To learn more about Foxwell Founders and conversations like this one, go here: www.foxwellfounders.com
Full Transcript:
(00:04) If you work in D2C and you use AI and you're wondering what the F is going on every week, this is your podcast, the AI D2C WTF podcast, your home for tactical tips, strategies, and ideas that you can implement right now in your AI workflows to make your brand or agency more money. Hello, and welcome to a new episode of AI D2C WTF.
(00:27) Today is actually a solo episode, and I thought we are spending all this time talking to really, really inspiring people in the D2C space who are really geeking down on things, talking about super advanced workflows and all that kind of stuff. And today I just wanted to break down some of the most impactful skills I've encountered in my everyday life now for a long time.
(00:57) And they're super simple and they're not really tailored to the marketing space, but it works really, really great in the marketing space. It works really, really great for to running your business and making sure that you're making the right decisions. And so I thought I'm just going to share it with you today.
(01:17) So the idea here is that instead of going like super, super high level, let's go super, super, super practical and let's dive into it. Okay. So I'm presuming you know what skills is, but skills is basically an MD text file that Claude or your OpenClaw or the other AI things can read to do a certain recipe, like a standard operating procedure.
(01:43) That's the whole idea. And the skill files, Claude and others will automatically understand when you want to or should use a skill. And automatically based on that, it will kind of go through the recipe. So that's a general idea. Okay. And instead of talking about how to create amazing creatives or creating beautiful reports or going deep on some analytic things, the most valuable skills for me in my everyday life at the moment are the following skills.
(02:20) The first skill is called grill me. And grill me, the skill grill me, the whole premise, the whole idea is to make sure that you and the AI align. Okay. So anytime I'm uncertain on what I think about a certain thing, or if the AI is understanding a certain thing, I use the grill me skill. And I'm going to give you a few use cases, but at first I kind of just want to share where the grill me comes from.
(02:48) So one of the guys I follow on YouTube, great guy, Matt Pockock. He has this skill file on, uh, on GitHub. I'm going to share that with you. And in this skill file, he has the grill me skill and it is three small sentences. Um, and it is just so powerful. It doesn't need to be super, super advanced. So the grill me skill basically says, interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until we reach a shared understanding.
(03:21) Walk down each branch of the design tree, uh, resolving dependencies between decisions one by one for each question, provide your recommended answers. Ask the questions one at a time. If a question can be answered by exploring the database, explore the code base instead. So it is originally created to do development, do coding, right? And I do a fair bit of that.
(03:44) So that's kind of when I started using it, but it now has evolved. So for example, me and my business partner were considering hiring, uh, a new head of our agency. Uh, we were not really sure what kind of role it should be. We just felt that we needed some help. So we both used the grill me skill. And I think I had something like 36 questions asked and Chris, my partner had something like 17 because they then reached a shared understanding quicker.
(04:16) Um, that really helped us to hone down what we actually want, what we actually need, what are we looking for? And both of those were created as MD documents. And we then kind of compared notes and discussed and, and found kind of the right path, right? It can also be, um, what's not working with our weekly reports.
(04:36) What kind of things are we not thinking about? Is it actually solving the problem? You can then evolve, uh, invoke the grill me skill and the grill me skill will actually help you get clarity. So it doesn't really have to, uh, to be anything around coding or development. It can be business. It can be life. Should we go to, uh, a tent trip or should we do a glamping trip with the family? Whatever it is, the grill me skill is just amazing.
(05:01) Okay. So, um, it, it might sound super simple. It is just kind of three, uh, small sentences, but it's really, really, really powerful. So don't underestimate. And I would highly recommend you testing out the grill me skill. AI D to C WTF is brought to you by motion. And this episode is brought to you by runneth from motion.
(05:28) And if you run paid social, I mean, obviously, you know, motion, it's a creative analytics platform that everybody uses. Uh, but the thing I've been obsessed with lately is run it. And it's their AI agent that lives right inside of your ad data. The simplest way to explain it. Most people use AI by asking it one thing.
(05:43) Like, Hey, what did we do yesterday? How'd it go? Runneth is the upgrade of that. You just tag it and ask it to do almost anything. It goes into your account. Does it like build me this week's creative recap, pull the data and write a brief on what to iterate next. Tell me which ads, uh, to make next. And it goes on and does this in plain English.
(06:00) So two things that actually make it really special, right? So under the hood, it's, it's Claude, right? Um, and anything Claude can do, right? It can do basically even better as long as you get access. And second, it's wired from everything motion has. So, uh, the AI tags, the creative, the frame by frame breakdowns.
(06:15) Um, and then it's trained by $14 billion in ad spend on motions customers, right? So it's pretty insane. Um, so the way that, you know, we're using it and I know some other colleagues are using it. Like I looked at what they're doing and we talked through it. People are, you know, having it drop a morning brief in Slack on how the account's performing.
(06:34) It gets smarter every time it runs. It's less like a tool and more like a creative strategist working while you sleep. So go see it at motionapp.com. That's runneth from motion and make ads that win without getting lucky. Then the second one I wanted to talk about today is the handoff skill. And the handoff skill, you know, you, in, when you use AI, you have very limited context windows, right? I think right now, as of this recording, Opus 4.
(07:07) 8 is like 1 million tokens or something like that. And what happens, uh, and again, uh, Mac, back to Matt Pockock, who are also created this skill, which you can find in his skill library. And this is kind of the handoff here. But, um, he calls it, uh, that the context window has a smart zone and a dumb zone. And after two, 300,000 tokens is used, uh, the AI starts to be confused.
(07:35) It starts to be quite stupid in terms of how, uh, they're, uh, remembering things or trying to solve things. It can be confused, et cetera, et cetera. So whenever I find myself having a longer discussion with, uh, with, for example, Claude, and I realized that I'm now transitioning from the smart zone to the dumb zone, that is why when I use the handoff skill.
(07:57) And the point of the handoff skill is to take all the relevant information that you had in this chat, in this context window, capture everything down to an MD file, and give me a short prompt I can give to a new, uh, Claude or a new, uh, open Claude or whatever it is. And based on that, uh, it can then continue working.
(08:19) It can just hands off the work to a fresh context window instead. And this is so brilliant, right? So you feel like you finally nailed something down. The core concept where you want to keep on chatting, you want to keep on discussing, you want to keep on exploring. You can just, uh, use the handoff skill and it will then pack everything very nicely in, and then let you work, uh, continue the work somewhere else.
(08:45) So the handoff skill is, uh, what is it? One, two, three, four, five small sentences. Write a handoff document summarizing the current conversation. So a fresh agent can continue the work. Save to a temporary directory of the user's OS, not the current workspace. Include a suggested skill section in a document, which suggests skills that the agent should invoke.
(09:04) Do not duplicate content already captured in other artifacts. Reference them by path or URL instead. Redact any sensitive information such as API keys, passwords, personal information. If the user passed arguments, treat them as a description of what's next we'll focus on and tailor the doc accordingly. So again, short, simple, super, super powerful.
(09:28) So anytime I find myself having, like, going into a good flow and I feel like the AI is getting into the dumb zone, I just invoke the handoff and I kind of continue in, uh, another section. Yes. My friends, first of all, um, we will share in, uh, the description of this, uh, this, uh, podcast episode, link to Matt Pocock's skills on, uh, GitHub.
(09:54) I highly, highly, highly recommend it. Uh, I think it's, it's great. I love that it's so simple, but it's also then so powerful. Right. Um, and, uh, again, I think it's important to find little things that are making your everyday work much, much better. It doesn't have to be a super, super, um, complicated skill, right? It can be small things like this.
(10:19) So I used to grill me and the handoff 10, 15 times a day. So for me, it is super, super valuable. Okay. So that's kind of it for my little solo episode. Uh, I hope you find it valuable. Please give us some feedback. If you like this, um, I think that it's underrated to have small little tricks like this. And I felt obligated to share this with you today.
(10:42) Okay. Thank you so much for listening or watching. Remember to subscribe and have a wonderful day. And I catch you in a next one.