README

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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 Installation (30-second setup)

A plugin updates itself. skills.sh copies editable files into your project, and you update them by hand. Pick one per agent, because installing both gives you every skill twice.

 1. Get the skills


Claude Code

bash
claude plugin install mattpocock-skills@claude-plugins-official


Updates itself by default.




Codex

bash
codex plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills
codex plugin add mattpocock-skills@mattpocock


Updates itself at startup.




GitHub Copilot (CLI and VS Code)

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


Then, once, add to ~/.copilot/settings.json:

json
{
  "extraKnownMarketplaces": {
    "mattpocock": { "source": { "source": "github", "repo": "mattpocock/skills" }, "autoUpdate": true }
  }
}


In VS Code, run Chat: Install Plugin From Source and enter https://github.com/mattpocock/skills. It updates daily.




Gemini CLI (manual updates)

bash
gemini skills install https://github.com/mattpocock/skills.git --path skills/engineering
gemini skills install https://github.com/mattpocock/skills.git --path skills/productivity


Re-run both commands to update.




Any other agent, or editable files (manual updates)

bash
npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills -a    cursor, opencode, devin, windsurf, amp, pi; omit -a to choose


When the installer asks which skills to take, include setup-matt-pocock-skills. To update, run npx skills@latest update, and re-run add to pick up new skills.



 2. Run /setup-matt-pocock-skills

In your agent, run it once per repo. It will:

- Ask you which issue tracker you want to use (GitHub, GitLab, local files, or anything else you describe)
- 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

 3. Bam - you're ready to go.

 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 

Top issues

Discussions

Latest release

Patch Changes

- 1194 b645f47 Thanks @mattpocock! - ask-matt now reads a skill's SKILL.md before stating what it does or recommending a step be skipped, instead of trusting its own one-line summaries (614).

- 1304 5beb35b Thanks @mattpocock! - chief-of-staff now keeps its memory in an LLM wiki (an index.md plus one page per topic, maintained through ingest, query and lint) and writes it as a historical record: every claim is dated, and every claim about code cites the commit it was true at.

- 1208 3da8c01 Thanks @mattpocock! - code-review now searches the repo for standards files and always