Agent skills · Coding
Skills For Real Engineers: Matt Pocock’s daily engineering skills Agents misread the task, ramble and speed up software entropy. Matt Pocock packed small, composable skills against each failure: /grill-me and /grill-with-docs question you before work starts, /tdd keeps a red-green-refactor loop, and /improve-codebase-architecture surveys the code for places where modules could be made deeper.
302,133 stars on GitHub · #2
Get skill Open on GitHub
Author Matt Pocock
Licence MIT
Pack 38 skills in the pack
Updated 22 October 2026
Agents Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Cursor, OpenCode, Devin, Windsurf, Amp, Pi What it does grill-with-docs runs a thorough interview on your plan while updating GLOSSARY.md and ADRs so the agent speaks the project’s language to-spec turns the conversation into a spec on your issue tracker, and to-tickets slices it into tickets with blocking edges implement and implement-spec build from tickets, driving /tdd at agreed seams and closing out with /code-review diagnosing-bugs runs a gated loop: reproduce the bug in a red test, minimise, hypothesise, instrument, fix and regression-test Skills split into user-invoked ones you type yourself and model-invoked ones the agent reaches for when the task fits When to use it Before any change, when you need to be sure the agent understood the task the way you did Your project has its own jargon and the agent keeps describing it in long roundabout phrases The codebase is getting tangled and you want a list of refactoring candidates every few days Ask your agent /grill-me I want to add subscriptions to the app, question me before you touch anything Break this spec into tickets with dependencies using /to-tickets Run /improve-codebase-architecture and show me the deepening candidates Before you install /setup-matt-pocock-skills asks for your issue tracker and labels, and to-spec and to-tickets publish issues there, for example on GitHub or GitLab. Do not install both the plugin and the skills.sh copy, or every skill appears twice.
Questions How do I install Matt Pocock’s skills in Claude Code? Run claude plugin install mattpocock-skills@claude-plugins-official; the plugin updates itself. Then run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once per repo.
Do these skills work in Codex or Cursor? Yes. The README has commands for Codex, GitHub Copilot and Gemini CLI, and npx skills covers Cursor, OpenCode, Devin, Windsurf, Amp and Pi.
How do they differ from GSD, BMAD or Spec-Kit? The author argues those frameworks take control of the process away from you. His skills stay small and composable, easy to adapt.
