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Skills For Real Engineers

My agent skills that I use every day to do real engineering - not vibe coding.

Developing real applications is hard. Approaches like GSD, BMAD, and Spec-Kit try to help by owning the process. But while doing so, they take away your control and make bugs in the process hard to resolve.

These skills are designed to be small, easy to adapt, and composable. They work with any model. They're based on decades of engineering experience. Hack around with them. Make them your own. Enjoy.

If you want to keep up with changes to these skills, and any new ones I create, you can join ~60,000 other devs on my newsletter:

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Quickstart (30-second setup)

1. Run the skills.sh installer:

npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

2. Pick the skills you want, and which coding agents you want to install them on. Make sure you select /setup-matt-pocock-skills.

3. Run /setup-matt-pocock-skills in your agent. It will:

   • Ask you which issue tracker you want to use (GitHub, Linear, or local files)
   • Ask you what labels you apply to tickets when you triage them (/triage uses labels)
   • Ask you where you want to save any docs we create

4. Bam - you're ready to go.

Install as a Claude Code plugin

Prefer a plug-and-play install you don't maintain by hand? These skills also ship as a native Claude Code plugin. Instead of copying editable files into your repo, the plugin installs the whole skill set as a managed bundle that updates when I ship a new version — you subscribe rather than fork.

Inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills
/plugin install mattpocock-skills@mattpocock

Or from your shell:

claude plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills
claude plugin install mattpocock-skills@mattpocock

Then run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once per repo, exactly as in the quickstart above.

Two ways to install, two philosophies:

• skills.sh copies the skills into your project so you can hack on them and make them your own.
• The plugin keeps them as a read-only, always-current bundle you don't edit — best when you just want my set to work and follow along as it evolves.

Using Codex or another agent? The skills.sh installer already installs these skills into Codex and other Agent-Skills-standard harnesses today. A native Codex plugin is on the roadmap — see .agents/adr/0002-ship-as-a-claude-code-plugin.md.

Why These Skills Exist

I built these skills as a way to fix common failure modes I see with Claude Code, Codex, and other coding agents.

#1: The Agent Didn't Do What I Want

"No-one knows exactly what they want"

David Thomas & Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer

The Problem. The most common failure mode in software development is misalignment. You think the dev knows what you want. Then you see what they've built - and you realize it didn't understand you at all.

This is just the same in the AI age. There is a communication gap between you and the agent. The fix for this is a grilling session - getting the agent to ask you detailed questions about what you're building.

The Fix is to use:

• /grill-me - for non-code uses
• /grill-with-docs - same as /grill-me, but adds more goodies (see below)

These are my most popular skills. They help you align with the agent before you get started, and think deeply about the change you're making. Use them every time you want to make a change.

#2: The Agent Is Way Too Verbose

With a ubiquitous language, conversations among developers and expressions of the code are all derived from the same domain model.

Eric Evans, Domain-Driven-Design