Stuck During an AI Grilling Session? Hand Off to a Teaching Agent Instead of Faking It

When an AI agent grills you on something you do not actually understand, pause the session, hand the confusion off to a separate teaching agent, learn it, then come back. In this clip, Matt Pocock answers a junior developer who asked him what to do when they get grilled on a topic they cannot follow. His fix chains two of his Claude Code skills, /handoff and /teach, so you learn the gap without derailing the planning work. The video overlays the exact X post that spells out the six-step loop, which he says pulled around 3,000 likes.

The Problem: Getting Grilled on Something You Do Not Know

Pocock frames a specific moment. You are in a grilling session, working with the agent to plan something, and you realize you do not understand a piece of it. The overlaid post opens with that exact scenario: "A junior just asked me 'what do I do if I'm being grilled about something that I don't understand?'" The grilling session is where the agent interrogates your plan to surface bad assumptions. The failure mode is bluffing through a concept you have not grasped, which pollutes the plan with answers you cannot stand behind.

The Fix: Hand Off to a Teaching Agent

Instead of faking an answer, Pocock says to use his handoff skill to hand off to a teaching agent in a separate session. The handoff captures the confusing question and the context around it, then passes it to a fresh agent so you can go learn the thing on its own. The on-screen steps read: "In a grilling session" then "'I don't understand this'" then "'/handoff to a teaching agent to understand this.'" This keeps the investigation out of the planning thread.

Picking It Up With the Teach Skill

In the second workspace you pick up the handoff doc with the teach skill. Pocock is explicit that this assumes you already have a teaching workspace to go to. His setup: if you are new to a job or new to a codebase, keep the codebase in one directory and run the teach skill in another directory that saves information about the codebase. He gives the reason directly, so that you do not mess up the codebase with your own learning notes and scratch work from the teach skill. The post lists this as step 4, "Pick up the handoff doc with the /teach skill, in your teaching workspace," followed by step 5, "Learn it."

Why Two Workspaces Matter

The two-directory split does real work. The teach skill saves your progress and everything you have learned into the teaching workspace, so the learning is recorded and persists across sessions rather than living in a throwaway chat. Pocock's phrasing on screen is that the loop "records progress in your /teach skill." Separating the learning workspace from the codebase means the code stays clean while your notes accumulate somewhere they will not interfere.

Closing the Loop Back to the Grilling Session

The final step is to go back to the grilling session and pick up where you left off. Because the learning happened elsewhere, Pocock says your grilling session stays "totally clean." The post summarizes the payoff in one line: "Keeps the grilling session clean, records progress in your /teach skill, and helps you learn." He closes by noting the post did well, roughly 3,000 likes, and adds his own take that the teach skill is "massively underused."

Key Takeaways

When an agent grills you on something you do not understand, stop and learn it rather than bluffing an answer.
Use /handoff to package the confusing question and context, then pass it to a separate teaching agent in a fresh session.
Pick the handoff back up with /teach in a dedicated teaching workspace.
Keep the codebase in one directory and the teach workspace in another so learning notes never contaminate the code.
The teach skill saves your progress and what you learned, so the learning persists across sessions.
Return to the grilling session afterward and continue where you left off, leaving that thread clean.