Matt Pocock Skills
A focused daily engineering loop built around alignment, domain language, feedback, and codebase design.
How this collection thinks
Matt’s collection is an expert’s personal toolbox rather than a framework that owns the whole development process. It keeps the engineer in control, treats context as scarce, and uses composable commands to solve recurring failure modes: misunderstood requirements, weak feedback loops, vague project language, and architectural entropy.
Install
npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skillsBest for
Solo developers and small teams that want a sharp Claude Code-first workflow, especially for requirements interrogation, domain modeling, TDD, debugging, and maintaining deep module boundaries.
Trade-offs
Several workflows assume Matt’s setup conventions and issue-tracker vocabulary. Platform behavior is strongest in Claude Code, the collection has no catalog-wide behavior evals, and its lifecycle coverage after implementation is lighter than Addy’s.
Start here
Our reviewed entry points
These are the skills with the clearest standalone value. Each review explains the benefit and the cost.
Grill Me
The clearest reason to install Matt’s collection. Grill Me turns vague intent into a visible decision tree and refuses to let the agent silently fill gaps, which directly addresses the most expensive failure in agentic coding: building the wrong thing quickly.
Grill With Docs
Grill With Docs improves on a normal requirements interview by turning resolved language and architectural choices into durable project context. That makes later sessions shorter and reduces inconsistent naming across both code and agent explanations.
TDD
A pragmatic, seam-oriented TDD guide that insists on observing the failure before implementation and favors tests through public behavior. It is especially useful when coding agents otherwise add tests after the fact to bless what they already wrote.
Diagnosing Bugs
This skill makes debugging a sequence of evidence-producing gates: reproduce, minimize, hypothesize, instrument, fix, and regression-test. It is a strong antidote to agents editing the first suspicious line and declaring victory.
Codebase Design
Codebase Design gives agents a compact architectural vocabulary centered on deep modules, narrow interfaces, locality, and testable seams. It improves design conversations without pretending that a generic architecture pattern fits every repository.
Stable inventory
All 25 curated skills
In-progress experiments are excluded from this editorial collection.
Workflow
Review
Code Review
Reviews a diff independently against repository standards and the originating specification.
View skill sourceArchitecture
Codebase Design
Designs deep modules with small interfaces, clean seams, and testable behavior.
View skill sourceDomain Modeling
Sharpens project terminology, edge cases, context documents, and architectural decisions.
View skill sourceImprove Codebase Architecture
Surveys a codebase for high-leverage opportunities to deepen module boundaries.
View skill sourceDebugging
Diagnosing Bugs
Runs a gated diagnosis loop from reproduction and minimization through instrumentation and regression testing.
View skill sourceRequirements
Grill With Docs
Interrogates a design while building shared vocabulary and recording decisions as it goes.
View skill sourceGrill Me
Relentlessly interviews the user until every reachable branch of a decision is resolved.
View skill sourceGrilling
Provides the reusable design-tree interrogation discipline behind Matt’s interview workflows.
View skill sourceTo Questionnaire
Produces a focused questionnaire for a domain expert who holds missing decisions.
View skill sourceBuild
Implement
Implements an approved specification or ticket set through explicit engineering seams.
View skill sourceDiscovery
Prototype
Builds disposable code to answer a focused state, logic, or interface design question.
View skill sourceResearch
Research
Investigates a technical question against primary sources and saves a cited research artifact.
View skill sourceGit
Resolving Merge Conflicts
Resolves conflicts hunk by hunk from the documented intent of both branches.
View skill sourceSetup
Setup Matt Pocock Skills
Configures issue tracking, triage vocabulary, and project documentation conventions.
View skill sourceTesting
TDD
Applies a strict red-green loop and defines what makes an integration test worth keeping.
View skill sourcePlanning
To Spec
Synthesizes the current conversation into a specification without restarting discovery.
View skill sourceTo Tickets
Breaks work into tracer-bullet tickets with explicit blocking relationships.
View skill sourceTriage
Moves issues and external pull requests through defined verification and briefing states.
View skill sourceWayfinder
Maps large multi-session work as a graph of decisions before implementation begins.
View skill sourceOperations
Wizard
Creates an interactive script for manual infrastructure, credentials, and cutover steps.
View skill sourceProductivity
Handoff
Compacts a conversation into a durable artifact that another agent can continue from.
View skill sourceTeach
Runs a stateful, multi-session learning workflow inside a dedicated workspace.
View skill sourceCommunication
Agent Design
Writing for Agents
Makes skills and instruction documents produce predictable agent behavior.
View skill sourceNot sure which collection fits?
Explore the other expert toolkits by workflow, scope, platform, and strongest use cases.