Matt Pocock's Agent Skills, Explained: What's Inside and How to Install Them

If you've been hearing about "matt pocock skills" lately, here's the full picture. Matt Pocock (TypeScript educator, founder of aihero.dev) open-sourced the agent skills he actually uses every day, straight from his own .agents directory. They're built for one purpose: making coding agents do real engineering instead of vibe-coding. Here's what's in the repo, why it exists, and how to install it.

What the repo is

mattpocock/skills (MIT licensed) is a collection of agent skills — reusable instruction packs that teach coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and others) how to do real engineering work instead of vibe-coding. The pitch: small, composable skills based on decades of engineering experience, not a process framework that takes away your control.

Why these skills exist: 4 failure modes

Pocock built the skills to fix four failure modes he kept seeing with coding agents:

1. The agent didn't do what I want. The fix is a "grilling session" — the agent interviews you about the change before writing code. That's /grill-me (and /grill-with-docs, which also builds your project's shared vocabulary).
2. The agent is way too verbose. The fix is a shared language — a glossary document so the agent uses 1 word where it used 20.
3. The code doesn't work. The fix is feedback loops: a /tdd skill (red-green-refactor) and a /diagnosing-bugs skill (a disciplined, phase-gated debugging loop).
4. We built a ball of mud. Agent-accelerated code rots faster. The fix is continuous design care, including /improve-codebase-architecture, which surveys your codebase for deepening opportunities.

The skills worth knowing

• /grill-me — the most popular one. Relentlessly interviews you about a plan until every design decision is resolved. Use it before every change.
• /grill-with-docs — grilling plus it builds your GLOSSARY.md and ADRs as you go.
• /tdd — red-green-refactor loop for features and bug fixes.
• /diagnosing-bugs — reproduce → minimise → hypothesise → instrument → fix → regression-test, gated phase by phase.
• /code-review — two-axis diff review (standards + spec fidelity).
• /triage, /implement, /to-spec, /ask-matt — issue triage, spec-driven implementation, and a router that picks the right skill for your situation.

How to install

Claude Code (official marketplace plugin):

claude plugins install mattpocock-skills

Codex and other agents:

npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

Then run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once per repo to configure the issue tracker and conventions. Pick one install method — installing both gives you every skill twice.

Where SkillStack fits in

The repo is free and MIT-licensed, and you should absolutely install it from the source. If you want Pocock's debugging discipline as a polished, install-ready package with documentation, SkillStack carries his /diagnosing-bugs skill — a phase-gated diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions, repackaged with attribution.

Pair it with our complementary debugging skills: Systematic Debugging (a 4-phase root-cause protocol for everyday bugs) and Test-Driven Development (the red-green-refactor discipline). If you're setting up Claude Code for the first time, our MCP setup guide walks through connecting editors and tools.

Who this is for

• Developers using Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor who want their agent to follow real engineering discipline
• Teams tired of agents that produce verbose, untested, ball-of-mud code
• Anyone who searched "matt pocock skills" and wants the 30-second install, not a sales pitch

Who this is not for

• If you never touch code, these skills aren't for you — they're instruction packs for coding agents
• If you want a fully-managed process (GSD, BMAD, Spec-Kit style), Pocock's philosophy is the opposite: small skills you own and adapt