Matt Pocock's skills for Claude

Everyone trades "magic prompts", while Matt Pocock simply published his working .claude folder on GitHub — and in five months it collected 169 thousand stars 🔥

What it is and who it's for

mattpocock/skills is an Agent Skills repo subtitled "Skills for Real Engineers": the actual set of skills Matt Pocock (author of Total TypeScript and AI Hero, ex-Vercel) uses every day. Inside are 22 skills: 17 engineering ones and 5 for productivity. The repo launched in February 2026; as of 2026-07-14 it has 169,086 stars and 14.5K forks — the "115K" figure circulating in viral posts is already out of date, the repo keeps growing. Everything is open under MIT.

Who it's for: people building real projects with Claude Code (or Codex) who keep hitting four classic pains: the agent did the wrong thing; the agent produces filler; the code doesn't work; the codebase slides into a big ball of mud. Unlike heavy processes such as BMAD or Spec-Kit (which the author explicitly positions himself against), Pocock's skills are small, composable and easy to adapt — the process stays yours.

Key capabilities

• /grill-me and /grill-with-docs — the "grilling": the agent interrogates you about the task until every fork in the road is resolved. The repo's most popular skills; grill-with-docs also builds a project glossary (CONTEXT.md) and ADRs — the agent stops producing filler because it speaks in the project's terms.
• /tdd — red-green-refactor: failing test first, then code, one vertical slice at a time.
• /diagnosing-bugs — disciplined debugging: reproduce → minimize → hypothesis → measure → fix → regression test.
• The /to-spec → /to-tickets → /implement pipeline — a conversation becomes a spec, the spec becomes tickets (GitHub, Linear or local files), the tickets become code with TDD and a code review at the end. For work spanning more than one session there's /wayfinder.
• /improve-codebase-architecture — scans the codebase, shows an HTML report with places to simplify and grills you on the one you pick.
• Plus /code-review, /triage, /prototype, /research, /handoff, /teach. Some skills you invoke yourself (user-invoked), some the agent picks up automatically (model-invoked).

Get started in 5 minutes

1. In the terminal: npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills — pick the skills and agents you want (Claude Code, Codex and others). Be sure to check setup-matt-pocock-skills.
2. In the agent run /setup-matt-pocock-skills (once per repo): it asks about your issue tracker, triage labels and where to put docs.
3. Start your next feature with /grill-with-docs — and compare the result with a plain "just build me this".

An alternative is the native Claude Code plugin: /plugin marketplace add mattpocock/skills, then /plugin install mattpocock-skills@mattpocock. The plugin updates itself but you can't edit the skill files; installing via npx copies the skills into your project instead — edit them however you like.

When to use it, when not to

✅ Take it if you're building a real project with Claude Code and the agent regularly "does the wrong thing" — grilling fixes that better than any "magic prompt". ✅ Take it if you want a "spec → tickets → TDD → review" process without a heavy framework that owns your process. ❌ Skip it → use "skill-creator" instead if your goal is writing your own skills from scratch rather than adopting someone else's process. ❌ Skip it → use "obsidian-skills" instead if what you need isn't engineering discipline but an agent working with a specific format (Obsidian notes). ❌ Skip it if you only live in the ChatGPT/Gemini web chat — slash skills don't work there, see the "Custom GPTs/Gems" section.

The honest price

Completely free: open source under the MIT license, no subscription, no signup — you only need GitHub and an agent that supports Agent Skills. The author monetizes through the AI Hero newsletter (per the README, around 60K subscribers) and courses, which doesn't affect access to the skills. Tag: free / oss.

Gotchas

• The skills impose discipline: grilling before the task, tests, tickets. For "throw a prototype together tonight" that's overhead — /prototype is enough there; the full pipeline pays off on projects that live longer than a week.
• You need an agent that supports Agent Skills: Claude Code natively, Codex and compatible ones via the skills.sh installer. It won't work in a plain Claude/ChatGPT web chat.
• Without /setup-matt-pocock-skills some engineering skills (triage, to-spec, to-tickets) don't know where to write tickets — don't skip the setup step.
• Don't mix the two install methods: npx copies editable files into your project, the plugin installs a read-only bundle.
• The repo changes actively (latest release v1.1.0 from 2026-07-08): if you customized the skills, diff them after updating.
• 169K stars ≠ the final word: this is one (very strong) engineer's process — fit it to your stack instead of copying blindly.

🤖 Prompt accelerator

"I've installed the mattpocock/skills skills in Claude Code and run /setup-matt-pocock-skills. I want to add to the project. Run /grill-with-docs and grill me on this feature: goals, users, edge cases, module boundaries, terms for CONTEXT.md. When no forks are left — assemble /to-spec, break it into tickets with /to-tickets and tell me which one to start /implement with."