Engineering

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)

Option A — skills.sh installer

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.

Option B — Claude Code plugin marketplace

This repo is also a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Each bucket is a separately installable plugin, so you can grab just the category you want.

# Add the marketplace once
claude plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills

# Then install whichever buckets you want
claude plugin install engineering@mattpocock-skills
claude plugin install productive@mattpocock-skills
claude plugin install misc@mattpocock-skills
claude plugin install personal@mattpocock-skills

Available plugins: engineering, productive, misc, personal. After installing engineering, run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once per repo as described above.

Option C — OpenAI Codex plugin marketplace

The same repo is also a Codex marketplace (it reuses the exact same skills). Each bucket is a separately installable Codex plugin.

# Add the marketplace once
codex plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills

# Then install whichever buckets you want
codex plugin add engineering@mattpocock-skills
codex plugin add productive@mattpocock-skills
codex plugin add misc@mattpocock-skills
codex plugin add personal@mattpocock-skills

Both the Claude and Codex plugins ship the same skills for every bucket.

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

The Problem: At the start of a project, devs and the people they're building the software for (the domain experts) are usually speaking different languages.