Skills For Real Engineers

Workflow

Matt Pocock's composable Claude Code skills for TDD, requirement grilling, diagnosis, and architecture improvement.

by mattpocock (Matt Pocock)mattpocock/skills

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LicenseMIT

Last pushtoday

Install

install

$ npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

Update

update

$ npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

Re-running the installer fetches the latest version; re-select the skills/agents you want.

When to use it

You want Claude to interview you and reach shared understanding before writing code (grill-me / grill-with-docs)
You want to enforce a real TDD red-green-refactor loop instead of one-shot code generation (tdd)
You need a disciplined debugging loop for a hard bug or performance regression (diagnose)
You're fighting a 'ball of mud' codebase and want guided architectural deepening (improve-codebase-architecture)

Commands & flags

/setup-matt-pocock-skills: One-time per-repo setup to configure issue tracker and docs paths.
/grill-me: Interview you to reach shared understanding before coding.
/tdd: Enforce a real red-green-refactor TDD loop.
/diagnose: Run a disciplined debugging loop for a hard bug or perf regression.
/improve-codebase-architecture: Guided architectural deepening for a ball-of-mud codebase.
/to-prd, /to-issues, /triage, /zoom-out, /prototype, /handoff: Productivity and misc slash commands from the collection.

How to use it

Install with the skills.sh installer, select the skills and agents you want, then run the one-time setup once per repo to configure your issue tracker and docs paths.

npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

Then in Claude Code:

/setup-matt-pocock-skills

Invoke individual skills as slash commands: /grill-me, /grill-with-docs, /tdd, /diagnose, /improve-codebase-architecture, /to-prd, /to-issues, /triage, /zoom-out, /prototype, /handoff. The collection (19 skills) is grouped into Engineering, Productivity, and Misc — including git-guardrails-claude-code to block dangerous git commands and write-a-skill.

Why it earns its place

A widely-used collection maintained directly from Matt Pocock's own .claude directory, so it reflects real day-to-day engineering rather than a demo. Instead of one prescriptive framework, it offers small, composable, model-agnostic skills that target specific AI-coding failure modes — misalignment, verbosity, broken code, and architectural decay — turning the agent into a disciplined engineering participant.

Try it

claude

> /grill-me then /tdd to build the new auth flow