Combined Engineering Skills

Karpathy behavioral principles + Pocock engineering workflow skills, packaged as a single installable skill set for Claude Code and opencode.

What's Included

Always-On Principles (4)

These are active in every conversation without any command:

Think Before Coding — Don't assume. Surface tradeoffs. Ask when uncertain.
Simplicity First — Minimum code that solves the problem. Nothing speculative.
Surgical Changes — Touch only what you must. Clean up only your own mess.
Goal-Driven Execution — Define success criteria. Loop until verified.

Slash Commands (16)

Engineering (12)

Skill	What It Does
`/diagnose`	Disciplined diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions
`/git-guardrails`	Block dangerous git commands (push, reset --hard, clean, branch -D)
`/grill-with-docs`	Grilling session that challenges your plan against domain model and docs
`/improve-codebase-architecture`	Find deepening opportunities informed by domain language and ADRs
`/prototype`	Build a throwaway prototype to flesh out a design
`/setup-combined-skills`	Scaffold per-repo config (issue tracker, triage labels, domain docs)
`/setup-pre-commit`	Set up Husky + lint-staged + Prettier pre-commit hooks
`/tdd`	Test-driven development with red-green-refactor loop
`/to-issues`	Break a plan into independently-grabbable issues using vertical slices
`/to-prd`	Turn conversation context into a PRD and publish to issue tracker
`/triage`	Triage issues through a state machine driven by triage roles
`/zoom-out`	Get broader context or a higher-level perspective on code

Productivity (4)

Skill	What It Does
`/caveman`	Ultra-compressed communication mode (~75% fewer tokens)
`/grill-me`	Relentless interview about a plan or design
`/handoff`	Compact conversation into a handoff document for another agent
`/write-a-skill`	Create new agent skills with proper structure

How They Work Together

Karpathy Principle	Pocock Skill	How They Reinforce Each Other
Think Before Coding	grill-me, grill-with-docs	When uncertain, interview rather than assume
Simplicity First	to-issues, tdd	Vertical slicing keeps each slice minimal
Surgical Changes	zoom-out, improve-codebase-architecture	Understand context first; deepen modules surgically
Goal-Driven Execution	tdd, diagnose, setup-pre-commit	Automated verification loops on every commit

Supported Platforms

Platform	Always-on file	Skill discovery
Claude Code	`CLAUDE.md`	`SKILL.md` + `plugin.json`
opencode	`AGENTS.md`	`SKILL.md` in `~/.agents/skills/`

First-Time Setup

After installation, run /setup-combined-skills in your project to configure the issue tracker, triage labels, and domain doc layout. This only needs to be done once per project.

Installation

Claude Code

npx skills@latest add ./path/to/combined-skills

opencode

Copy skills to ~/.agents/skills/combined-engineering-skills/ (opencode auto-loads from this directory):
```
cp -r skills/ ~/.agents/skills/combined-engineering-skills/skills/
```

Copy AGENTS.md to your project root or reference it in opencode.json:

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "instructions": ["AGENTS.md"]
}

Restart opencode for changes to take effect.

Verify Installation

Start a new conversation
The agent should surface assumptions before coding (Karpathy principle)
Try /grill-me — it should activate and start interviewing you
Try /setup-combined-skills — it should walk through issue tracker configuration

Uninstall

Claude Code

Remove the skill set from your Claude Code configuration:

npx skills@latest remove combined-engineering-skills

opencode

Remove the skills directory and clean up AGENTS.md reference:

rm -rf ~/.agents/skills/combined-engineering-skills/

Then remove the instructions entry from your opencode.json or delete AGENTS.md from your project root.

What Was Excluded

Category	Items	Reason
Personal skills	edit-article, obsidian-vault	Matt's personal setup
Misc skill	scaffold-exercises	Matt's specific course tooling (pnpm ai-hero-cli)
Deprecated skills	design-an-interface, qa, request-refactor-plan, ubiquitous-language	No longer maintained
In-progress skills	review, writing-beats, writing-fragments, writing-shape	Not yet ready
Personal tooling	migrate-to-shoehorn	Matt's personal tooling

Updates