Matt Pocock Skills

Matt Pocock's Skills for Real Engineers (github.com/mattpocock/skills) is the set of agent skills he uses daily, published straight from his own working directory. The framing is refreshingly pointed: real engineering, not vibe coding. Where process frameworks like GSD, BMAD or Spec-Kit help by owning your entire workflow — and take away your control in the process — these skills are deliberately small, composable and easy to adapt. They work with any model, and you are actively encouraged to hack on them.

What makes the collection cohere is that every skill targets a specific, named failure mode of AI-assisted development: misalignment (fixed by a grilling session — /grill-me, /grill-with-docs — that makes the agent interview you before it builds), missing domain context (fixed by /domain-modeling and a living CONTEXT.md), broken code (fixed by /tdd and a disciplined /diagnosing-bugs loop), and architectural rot (fixed by /codebase-design and /improve-codebase-architecture, which scans for deepening opportunities and reports them visually). The governing principle — "the rate of feedback is your speed limit; never take on a task that's too big" — is the most useful sentence we have read about working with coding agents.

For Claude Code users the on-ramp is genuinely 30 seconds: it ships as a plugin in Claude Code's official marketplace, so claude plugins install mattpocock-skills (or /plugin install mattpocock-skills in-session) is all it takes — nothing to add first, updates automatic. Run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once per repo to pick your issue tracker (GitHub, Linear or local files), and /ask-matt will route you to the right skill whenever you are unsure. A second, editable install path via npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills exists if you would rather own and fork the files — just don't install both. Highly recommended for anyone whose agent keeps confidently building the wrong thing. See our companion guide, Real Engineering with Claude Code, for the full walkthrough.