mattpocock/skills: Pocock's Discipline Kit for AI-Assisted Dev

Matt Pocock — the TypeScript educator behind Total TypeScript — published a set of composable agent skills designed to fix the specific ways AI pair programming goes wrong: agents that wander off-task, produce unrunnable code, skip tests, and quietly rot your architecture over time. At 271k stars, clearly a lot of people recognized those failure modes.

What it actually does

The repo splits its skills into two groups: ones you call yourself (/grill-with-docs, /triage, /implement) and ones the model invokes automatically under the hood (prototype, diagnosing-bugs, tdd). The user-invoked side is more interesting than it sounds.

grill-with-docs is the standout: before writing a single line of code, it runs an interview and builds a CONTEXT.md with project-specific vocabulary and domain model. It is a forcing function for the kind of upfront alignment that experienced developers do in their head but agents skip entirely. implement wraps a full TDD cycle — red-green-refactor — and exits with a code review rather than a vague "here you go." wayfinder maps multi-session projects as decision ticket workflows, which gets genuinely useful once a project grows past a single context window.

There are also productivity-side skills worth noting: handoff produces compact conversation handoff documents (useful when you hit context limits mid-feature), and wait-what re-explains unclear model responses using your project's own vocabulary. Small things, but the kind you reach for often.

The caveat

The improve-codebase-architecture skill surveys a codebase and flags candidates for deeper design work — but the docs are honest about what it will not do: untangle a genuinely complex legacy system. It is a scout, not a rescue team. More broadly, these skills add ceremony. The per-repo /setup-matt-pocock-skills configuration step is required before any engineering skills work, and it asks about your issue tracker (GitHub Issues, Linear, or local files) and documentation location. Right tradeoff, but still a step most people will skip the first time and then wonder why things feel broken.

There is also a quiet gotcha: if you install both the Claude Code plugin and the skills.sh CLI method, you end up with duplicate skills. Pick one install path and stick to it. The native Codex plugin is still on the roadmap as of the README, so if you are primarily on Codex you are using the npx skills@latest path for now.

Getting it in

The Claude Code plugin path is the lowest-friction option — managed and auto-updating:

# In a Claude Code session:
/plugin install mattpocock-skills

# Then, once per repo:
/setup-matt-pocock-skills

# For Codex / other agents:
npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

The /setup-matt-pocock-skills step wires up your issue tracker and docs location — do not skip it, the engineering skills will not behave correctly until it runs.

Credit

Repo: mattpocock/skills, MIT license. Built by Matt Pocock — if you do TypeScript, you probably already know him from Total TypeScript. The skills live in his .agents directory; this is literally what he uses day-to-day.