skills

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: Sign Up To The Newsletter Installation (30-second setup) Two ways in, two philosophies. **The Claude Code plugin** installs the whole set as a managed, read-only bundle that updates when I ship — you subscribe rather than fork. **skills.sh** copies editable skill files into your project, so you can hack on them and make them your own. Pick one — installing both leaves you with every skill twice. 1. Get the skills Claude Code Or, from inside a session: It's in Claude Code's official marketplace, so there's nothing to add first, and updates arrive automatically. Codex, and other agents Pick the skills you want, and which coding agents to install them on. **The installer lets you choose which skills to take — make sure `setup-matt-pocock-skills` is one of them.** A native Codex plugin is on the roadmap — see `.agents/adr/0002-ship-as-a-claude-code-plugin.md`. For tinkerers Use the same installer, on any agent — including Claude Code: It writes the skills into your repo as ordinary files you own and can edit. Nothing updates behind your back; pull my latest changes when you want them with `npx skills update`. 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, 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 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 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. I felt the same tension with my agents. Agents are usually dropped into a project and asked to figure out the jargon as they go. So they use 20 words where 1 will do. **The Fix** for this is a shared language. It's a document that helps agents decode the jargon used in the pro