REPO PACKAGE
mattpocock skills
COMMUNITY28skills
5groups
23ready to use
LABSCO SUMMARY
Matt Pocock, a TypeScript educator whose newsletter he describes as reaching about 60,000 developers, built this set against four failure modes he names directly: agents that misunderstand what you want, agents that are too verbose, code that does not work, and codebases that degrade into a ball of mud. The skills split into two groups the README names: Engineering (tdd, diagnosing-bugs, code-review, domain-modeling, codebase-design, research, prototype) and Productivity (grill-me, handoff, teach, writing-great-skills), each further split into user-invoked skills you type and model-invoked skills the agent reaches for on its own.
Thirty-five of the thirty-eight are ready to use as written; three need a local tool or binary the description names. None of it works cold, though -- the README says to run /setup-matt-pocock-skills before using any engineering skill, which asks which issue tracker (GitHub, Linear, or local files) and which triage labels the project uses, then writes that choice into the repository it runs against.
READ THE FULL ANALYSIS
Some of this is idiosyncratic by design. grill-me, grilling, and grill-with-docs are three separate skills for the same interview technique at increasing depth; wizard produces a bash script for a person to run through manual, unautomatable steps rather than doing the work itself; and migrate-to-shoehorn only matters if the target codebase already uses @total-typescript/shoehorn, a library from the same author. None of this claims to generalize -- it is one engineer's daily practice, released as it is used.
Not an official framework. mattpocock/skills is MIT-licensed, community-built, and unaffiliated with any agent vendor. The README says it works with any model, but what it delivers is an opinionated software-engineering process, not a general utility library -- expect friction if the team on the other end does not want to write ADRs and keep a CONTEXT.md current.
ALSO IN THIS PACKAGE
PLUGINS
1 itemPLUGIN
mattpocock-skills
Matt Pocock's agent skills for real engineering: grilling, spec/ticket flows, TDD, code review, domain modelling and more. Plug-and-play, not vibe coding.
WHAT'S INSIDE
28 showing · 28 totalReady to use
Nothing else to set up — install it and go.
28 of 28
SETUP
Showing all 28 skills
From a ticket to a merged change7 skills
claude-handoff
Hands the conversation you are in to a second agent that keeps working in the background, with a written summary so nothing has to be explained twice.
code-review
Two separate reviews of the same change: one asks whether it follows the house rules, the other whether it does what the ticket asked for.
diagnosing-bugs
Hard bugs get solved by first building one command that fails on the bug and passes once it is fixed — everything after that is mechanical.
handoff
Boils this conversation down into one document that someone else, or a fresh session, can pick the work up from.
implement
Takes a spec or a stack of tickets all the way to committed code — tests first, typechecked, and reviewed before anything lands.
tdd
The rules that make writing tests first produce tests worth keeping: check what the code does from the outside, at boundaries agreed before a line is written.
triage
Works through the reports piling up in the tracker and leaves each one either ready for someone to build, or closed with the reason written down.
Keeping the codebase arguable3 skills
codebase-design
A shared vocabulary — module, interface, depth, seam, adapter — so a team argues about the design itself instead of about what the words mean.
domain-modeling
Pins down what a project's own words mean, so two people using the same term aren't describing different things — and records the decisions that will hurt to reverse.
improve-codebase-architecture
Scans a codebase for the parts most worth restructuring and lays them out in a web page you can open, each with a before and after, so you can pick one.
One-off jobs on a repository6 skills
git-guardrails-claude-code
A safety catch on Claude Code: the git commands that can throw work away are refused before they run, not apologised for afterwards.
migrate-to-shoehorn
Tests often need half an object, or deliberately wrong data — this replaces TypeScript's unsafe escape hatch with helpers that keep the type checker happy.
scaffold-exercises
Lays out the folders for a course — numbered sections, each exercise with its problem, solution or explainer — already named the way the project's checker demands.
setup-matt-pocock-skills
A one-time setup: it asks where this project keeps its issues, labels and docs, and writes the answers where every other skill in the set can read them.
setup-pre-commit
Makes the checks run by themselves at the moment you commit, so formatting, types and tests are caught on your machine rather than in a failed build.
wizard
Some setup steps only a person can do — clicking through somebody else's website to fetch a key. This turns those into a script that opens each page, says exactly what to click, takes the value you copy back, and puts it where it belongs.
Pinning the job down first8 skills
ask-matt
A way to ask which of these skills fits the situation you are in right now — and which one takes the work afterwards.
grill-me
An interview that keeps going until there is nothing left in your plan that you are only assuming — and it leaves no files behind.
grill-with-docs
The same interview as grill-me, except every term it settles goes into the project's glossary and every hard-to-reverse choice into a written record.
grilling
The questioning engine the other grill skills run on — one round of questions at a time, you make every decision, and it digs up its own facts.
loop-me
Interviews you about the jobs you keep doing by hand, until one is written down precisely enough for another agent to build it without asking anything.
prototype
Throwaway code written to settle one question — does this logic hold up, or what should this screen actually look like — before anything real is built on it.
research
Sends a background agent off to answer a question from the official docs and source themselves, and leaves the findings in a file with every claim sourced.
wayfinder
Some jobs are too big and too vague to just start: you cannot see the way from here to there. This breaks the fog into the individual questions that have to be answered first, parks them on the issue tracker, and settles them one at a time until the route is obvious.
Writing, and being taught4 skills
teach
Teaches you a subject over many sittings — a short lesson at a time, a folder of cheat sheets, and a record of what you already know.
writing-beats
Writing an article as a journey rather than an outline, with one rule holding it together: no part of the piece may lean on an idea the reader has not been given yet, so every step both makes its move and opens up the ones that can follow.
writing-fragments
The notebook stage of writing, before anything has a shape: it interviews you about what you want to say and keeps every usable scrap that falls out — a good sentence, a story, a half-finished thought — in one file, deliberately unsorted.
writing-shape
An editor who will not let a paragraph in without a reason: it mines your notes for what the article needs, reworking each piece as it goes so the finished thing reads in a single voice rather than as a pile of quotes.
No skill in this package matches that.
HOW TO GET IT
WHOLE PACKAGEInstall the whole package (28 skills)
npx skills add mattpocock/skillsSINGLE SKILLOr install a single skill
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill <name> --full-depthPick the skill name from the Skills tab — each entry there installs independently.
PLUGIN MARKETPLACEAdd the marketplace, then install the plugin
/plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills/plugin install mattpocock-skills@mattpocockTyped inside the agent's own prompt, not in a terminal. The marketplace is called mattpocock, which is the part after the @.