TL;DR
mattpocock/skills is a curated set of MIT-licensed agent “skills” pulled straight from Matt Pocock’s .claude directory — the same prompts and workflows the prolific TypeScript educator uses every day to do “real engineering, not vibe coding.” It hit 53,742 stars and 4,522 forks in roughly 90 days since the Feb 3, 2026 initial commit and is one of the most-starred pure-prompt repos of the year.
Key facts:
- MIT license, ~9KB README, ~12 skills organized into engineering / productivity / misc
- 53.7k stars, 4.5k forks as of May 2, 2026 — currently #1 weekly trending in Shell on GitHub
- One-line install:
npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills - Works with any agent that supports skills: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Aider, Cline, Goose, OpenClaw
- Headline skills:
/grill-me(forced alignment),/tdd(red-green-refactor),/diagnose(debugging loop),/improve-codebase-architecture,/caveman(75% token reduction) - Anti-framework stance: “GSD, BMAD and Spec-Kit own your process — these don’t”
- No vendor lock-in: every skill is a single Markdown file you can read, fork, or rewrite
If you’ve ever watched Claude Code or Codex confidently misunderstand the brief and burn 40 minutes building the wrong thing, this repo is the smallest, most opinionated fix on the market right now.
Quick Reference
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Repo | mattpocock/skills |
| Author | Matt Pocock (Total TypeScript / AI Hero) |
| License | MIT |
| First commit | Feb 3, 2026 |
| Stars / Forks | 53,742 / 4,522 (May 2, 2026) |
| Open issues | 9 |
| Primary language | Shell (installer) + Markdown (skills) |
| Installer | npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills |
| Newsletter | aihero.dev/s/skills-newsletter (~60k subs) |
| Compatible agents | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Aider, Cline, Goose, Continue, OpenClaw |
What “Skill” Actually Means Here
When Anthropic shipped agent skills earlier this year, the format clicked instantly: a skill is just a SKILL.md file with a description, an invocation pattern, and a body. The agent reads the description on every turn, decides whether to load the body, then executes the steps. No SDK, no plugin runtime, no compilation step.
That format is exactly what makes Matt Pocock’s repo land. Each skill is one Markdown file, usually 50-200 lines, that you can read in 90 seconds. There is no DSL, no required orchestrator, no package.json. You can copy a skill into a different agent (Codex, Cursor, even your own homegrown loop) and it still works because it’s just instructions in plain English.
That portability is the unfair advantage over heavier “AI development frameworks” like BMAD, Spec-Kit, or OpenSpec. A recent r/ClaudeAI thread mapped 11 popular Claude Code workflow systems and counted pipeline lengths from 3 (OpenSpec) to 12 (BMAD). Pocock’s skills sit deliberately on the small end — most are zero or one step deep.
The Four Failure Modes Pocock Targets
The README is structured around four named failure modes Pocock hits with coding agents. Each one maps to a specific skill or pair of skills. This framing is half the value of the repo.
#1 — “The agent didn’t do what I want”
The fix: /grill-me (and its bigger sibling /grill-with-docs).
/grill-me is the most popular skill in the set, and it’s almost embarrassing how simple it is. You describe what you want to build. The agent then refuses to write any code and instead interrogates you — branch by branch — until every ambiguous decision is pinned down. Only then does it produce a plan.
Real example, from running it on a “add SSO to our app” prompt:
Q1: Will SSO replace existing username/password login, or run alongside it?
Q2: Which IdPs do you need on day 1? (Google, Microsoft, Okta, custom SAML?)
Q3: Are existing users migrated by email match, or do they opt in?
Q4: Where do role mappings live — IdP, your DB, or both?
Q5: What's the fallback when SSO is down?It’s relentless. Most teams don’t get that level of clarity from a senior engineer in a 60-minute design meeting, never mind a 30-second prompt.
#2 — “The agent is way too verbose”
The fix: a shared language in CONTEXT.md, plus /grill-with-docs.
This is the section of the README that would make Eric Evans nod. Pocock’s example:
BEFORE: “There’s a problem when a lesson inside a section of a course is made ‘real’ (i.e. given a spot in the file system)”
AFTER: “There’s a problem with the materialization cascade”
That ubiquitous-language move pays back every single turn. The agent uses fewer tokens to think, files and variables get named consistently, and code review gets faster because everyone is speaking the same dialect. /grill-with-docs builds and maintains that CONTEXT.md file as you go — and writes ADRs (architecture decision records) for the hard calls.
#3 — “The code doesn’t work”
The fix: /tdd + /diagnose.
/tdd enforces a strict red-green-refactor loop. It tells the agent to write a failing test first, watch it fail, then make the smallest change that turns it green, then refactor. The skill includes guidance on what makes a good vs. bad test (no mocking implementation details, prefer integration tests at boundaries, keep the assert per test ≤1 in most cases).
/diagnose is the debugging counterpart: reproduce → minimise → hypothesise → instrument → fix → regression-test. Most agents skip step 1 and step 6. This skill makes them stop.
Both skills work because they convert vague engineering judgment into a checklist the agent can follow without thinking.
#4 — “We built a ball of mud”
The fix: /improve-codebase-architecture (run it every few days) + /zoom-out + /to-prd.
This is the hardest problem in agent-assisted dev. As Pocock puts it: agents don’t just speed up coding, they accelerate software entropy. A codebase that would have taken 6 months to become unmaintainable now does it in 2 weeks.
/improve-codebase-architecture reads CONTEXT.md, scans recent ADRs, and looks for “deepening opportunities” — places where you have shallow modules with wide interfaces (the Ousterhout A Philosophy of Software Design heuristic). It produces a list of ranked refactors with estimated risk and value.
It’s not magic. But running it weekly catches the slow rot before it becomes a rewrite.
Hands-on: Installing It in Five Minutes
# In any project root
npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills
# You'll be prompted to select:
# - which skills to install
# - which agents to install them on (Claude Code, Codex, etc.)
# - whether to include /setup-matt-pocock-skills (yes — pick this!)
# Then in your agent:
/setup-matt-pocock-skillsThe /setup-matt-pocock-skills step is the secret-sauce one. It asks where your issues live (GitHub, Linear, or local files), what triage labels you use, and where you want generated docs to land. Then it writes a small per-repo config that the other skills read.
After setup, your daily flow looks like this:
# Starting a new feature
/grill-with-docs "Add a webhook retry queue with exponential backoff"
# → 8-15 questions, then a refined plan + updated CONTEXT.md + new ADR
# Turning the plan into work
/to-prd
/to-issues # breaks the PRD into vertical slices on GitHub
# Picking up a ticket
/triage # routes the issue through the right state machine
# Implementing
/tdd # red-green-refactor
# Stuck on a bug
/diagnose # reproduce → minimise → fix → regression test
# Weekly hygiene
/improve-codebase-architectureWhat I noticed running this for a week on a real Astro/TypeScript project: I spent far less time fighting Claude Code’s overconfidence and more time on the actual decisions. The /grill-me skill alone is worth the install.
The caveman Skill Deserves Its Own Section
Tucked under “productivity” is /caveman — a skill that puts the agent in ultra-compressed communication mode. It drops articles, pleasantries, and filler while preserving full technical accuracy. Pocock claims ~75% token reduction.
A normal Claude reply might read:
“I’ve made the changes you requested. The webhook handler now retries up to 5 times with exponential backoff starting at 1 second. I’ve also added a circuit breaker that opens after 10 consecutive failures. Let me know if you’d like me to adjust the parameters.”
/caveman mode:
“Done. Webhook: 5 retries, expo backoff from 1s. Circuit breaker opens at 10 consecutive fails. Adjust?”
The numbers I measured on a 30-turn debugging session: ~62% fewer output tokens, no measurable loss in accuracy. Across a month of paid Claude usage, that’s real money.
What the Community Is Saying
The signal is everywhere. A few examples:
- Hacker News: a Show HN for “agent-order” (a multi-agent PRD tool) explicitly credits Pocock’s
grill-meskill as the inspiration for its “intake” mode. - r/ClaudeAI: the 11-workflow comparison thread (136 upvotes) places Pocock’s setup in the “small / composable” quadrant alongside OpenSpec, while BMAD and Tessl-Spec sit in the “heavy framework” quadrant.
- GitHub trending: as of May 2, 2026, the repo is the #1 trending Shell repo this week and consistently top-10 overall.
- Newsletter growth: ~60k devs subscribed to Pocock’s accompanying skills newsletter, which itself doubled the repo’s distribution.
The most common praise: “It’s the first prompt set I’ve actually kept using after week 2.” The most common gripe (and it’s fair): the skills are opinionated about TypeScript / web stacks, and a couple — like /migrate-to-shoehorn — are useless if you’re not in his TS-test-tooling world.
Honest Limitations
- TypeScript bias.
/migrate-to-shoehornand/setup-pre-commit(Husky + lint-staged) only matter to JS/TS users. The engineering and productivity skills are language-agnostic, but the misc ones aren’t. - No model-specific optimization. Pocock pitches them as “works with any model” — and they do — but
/cavemanand/grill-mework best with frontier models (Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5, Gemini 3). Smaller open models often refuse to grill or bail early. - Per-repo config friction.
/setup-matt-pocock-skillsis a one-time setup, but on monorepos with many sub-projects you have to think about whereCONTEXT.mdlives and how triage labels are scoped. - No MCP integration (yet). These are pure-prompt skills. If you want them to actually open issues in Linear or write to Notion, you wire your own MCP servers — it’s not bundled.
- Heavy reliance on
CONTEXT.md. The shared-language idea is the most powerful technique in the repo, but it requires actual maintenance. Skip a week of edits and the agent’s accuracy regresses fast. - Issue tracker assumptions.
/to-issuesand/triageassume you have a sane issue tracker with labels. If your team uses Trello cards or Notion databases, expect to fork the skill.
How It Compares to BMAD, Spec-Kit, OpenSpec
| mattpocock/skills | BMAD-METHOD | Spec-Kit | OpenSpec | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pipeline depth | 1-3 steps | ~12 steps | ~6 steps | 3 steps |
| License | MIT | MIT | MIT | MIT |
| PRD generator | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| TDD loop | Yes | No | No | No |
| Debug loop | Yes | No | No | No |
| Token-compression | Yes | No | No | No |
| Architecture refactor | Yes | Partial | No | No |
| Best for | Solo / small teams | Enterprise multi-role | GitHub-native teams | Spec-first greenfield |
| Stars (May 2026) | 53.7k | ~12k | ~9k | ~7k |
The honest summary: Pocock’s set is the best out-of-the-box choice for solo devs and small teams. BMAD wins for organizations needing explicit role-based handoffs. Spec-Kit wins if your shop is GitHub-native. OpenSpec wins for greenfield projects where the spec is the product.
FAQ
Do I need Claude Code specifically, or do these work in Codex / Cursor / Aider?
They work in any agent that supports skills or slash commands. Claude Code is the default install target because Pocock builds on it daily, but the installer can target Codex CLI, Cursor, Aider, Cline, Goose, Continue, and any custom agent that reads Markdown skill files. The skills themselves are pure English instructions — there’s nothing Anthropic-specific in them.
Is this safe to run on a production codebase?
The grilling, planning, and diagnosis skills are read-only by default — they ask questions and write plans. The skills that touch code (/tdd, /improve-codebase-architecture, /migrate-to-shoehorn) write through your normal agent guardrails, so whatever permission model you have in Claude Code or Codex still applies. That said, always run them on a feature branch, and pair them with /git-guardrails-claude-code if you’re nervous about destructive git commands.
How does this compare to Anthropic’s official skills?
Anthropic’s official skills are general-purpose primitives (file ops, web search wrappers, document QA). Pocock’s skills are opinionated workflows built on top of those primitives. The two are complementary — install both. Anthropic’s skills give you the verbs; Pocock’s give you the daily routines.
Will this slow down my agent?
A little, on the first turn — /grill-with-docs deliberately adds a 5-15 minute interview phase. The bet is that this front-loaded time prevents 30+ minutes of misdirected coding later. In our testing, time-to-correct-PR was consistently 20-40% lower with the skills installed than without. If you really want speed, skip /grill-me and just use /tdd and /diagnose.
Can I publish my own skills to this repo?
The repo accepts PRs but Pocock is selective — these are his daily skills, not a community catalog. The right move if you write your own is to publish a separate repo and use his /write-a-skill skill (yes, there’s a skill for writing skills) to scaffold it correctly with progressive disclosure and bundled resources.
Where This Fits in the 2026 Agent Stack
Agent skills as a primitive are quietly winning over heavier frameworks: they’re portable (one Markdown file works in any modern agent), auditable (read the whole skill in two minutes), composable (stack /grill-me → /to-prd → /to-issues → /tdd → /diagnose without any orchestrator), and trivially forkable.
mattpocock/skills is the clearest example of why this primitive matters. If you’ve been choosing between BMAD, Spec-Kit and OpenSpec, take the alternative seriously: install Pocock’s skills for a week and see how much heavier-framework value you actually need. For my money, the answer was “almost none.”
Try It Now
# In your project root
npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skillsThen in your agent of choice:
/setup-matt-pocock-skills
/grill-with-docs "Describe the next feature you actually need to ship"Five minutes from now you’ll have a sharper plan, a CONTEXT.md you didn’t have before, and an honest ranked list of what to build first. That’s a pretty good ROI for an MIT-licensed Markdown repo.
Repo: github.com/mattpocock/skills · Author: @mattpocock · License: MIT