Skills for Real Engineers: Matt Pocock's 38 Claude Code Skills
Skills for Real Engineers is an MIT-licensed set of 38 agent skills from Matt Pocock, built as small composable pieces rather than a methodology. The flagship, grill-with-docs, interrogates your plan and leaves ADRs and a glossary behind. Here is what each group does and which agents it runs on.
Verified September 17, 2026: skill names, counts, install commands and licence were read from the repository and from our pinned copy at revision mattpocock/skills@74ca5fe. Star and push data come from the GitHub API snapshot in our catalogue, taken September 4, 2026.
Skills for Real Engineers is an MIT-licensed collection of 38 agent skills by Matt Pocock, taken from his own .agents directory, built as small composable pieces that refuse to own your process. It is the second most-starred agent skills repository in the catalogue we maintain — 249,413 stars recorded on September 4, 2026 — and the most recently pushed of the ten.
| Skills for Real Engineers at a glance | |
|---|---|
| Repository | github.com/mattpocock/skills |
| Author | Matt Pocock |
| Licence | MIT |
| Skills in our distribution | 38, pinned at 74ca5fe |
| Stars | 249,413 (GitHub API, September 4, 2026) |
| Last push | September 4, 2026 — most recent of the ten |
| Flagship skill | grill-with-docs |
| One-line install | npx skills@1 add mattpocock/skills |
Who uses it, and for what. The audience is engineers who already have a way of working and want single tools inside it — TypeScript and full-stack developers, tech leads, and anyone running Claude Code or Cursor daily. Matt Pocock is a TypeScript educator, and the collection reads like a working developer's drawer rather than a course: interrogate a plan before building, turn a conversation into tickets, run TDD, diagnose a bug that will not reproduce, hand a long session to a fresh agent, set up hooks that block a destructive git command. You reach for one when the moment arrives, and nothing changes how you work the rest of the time.
What "small and composable" means here
A process framework decides the order of your work. This repository decides nothing. Each skill is a single job you invoke when you want it — grill this plan, diagnose this bug, hand this session off — and none of them claims the session.
The difference shows up in the router. Matt ships a skill called ask-matt whose entire purpose is to tell you which of the other 37 fits your situation. A framework does not need a router, because the framework picks. A toolbox does.
The 38 skills, by job
| Job | Skills | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Interrogate a plan | grill-with-docs, grill-me, grilling, loop-me, wait-what |
A relentless interview that finds the gap between what you said and what you meant. wait-what is one line long: that message did not land, re-pitch it |
| Turn talk into artefacts | to-spec, to-tickets, to-questionnaire, wayfinder |
A spec or issue tickets synthesised from the conversation you already had. wayfinder maps work too big for one agent session as decision tickets |
| Build | tdd, implement, implement-spec, prototype, scaffold-exercises |
Red-green-refactor, spec-driven implementation, and throwaway prototypes that exist to answer one design question |
| Diagnose | diagnosing-bugs, triage, resolving-merge-conflicts |
A diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions, not a guess |
| Shape the codebase | codebase-design, domain-modeling, improve-codebase-architecture, setup-ts-deep-modules, migrate-to-shoehorn |
Shared vocabulary for deep modules: where a seam goes, which interface is too shallow |
| Manage the session | claude-handoff, handoff, retro, ask-matt |
Hand the conversation to a fresh background agent; run a retrospective on the session you just had |
| Write | writing-for-agents, writing-beats, writing-fragments, writing-shape, teach |
Writing documents that agents read — skills, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md — and prose that holds a shape |
| Guardrails and setup | git-guardrails-claude-code, setup-pre-commit, setup-matt-pocock-skills |
Claude Code hooks that block push, reset --hard, clean and branch -D before they execute |
| Review and ship | code-review, pr, research, wizard |
The everyday pieces, each usable alone |
The flagship: grill-with-docs
grill-with-docs is a relentless interview that sharpens a plan or design and writes the documentation as a by-product: architecture decision records and a glossary, committed to the repository. The interview is the point — the docs are what survives it.
The gap it closes is alignment. You know what you mean; the agent has your two sentences. Everything that goes wrong later was decided in that gap. grill-me is the same interview without the documents, and wait-what is the emergency version for a single message that did not land.
Which agents it works with
Skills for Real Engineers installs on Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode. These are the project's own install commands, read on September 17, 2026:
# Any agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot, OpenCode, 70+ more)
npx skills@1 add mattpocock/skills
# Claude Code plugin
claude plugins install mattpocock-skills
Use one path only — the upstream README warns explicitly against installing both the plugin and the npx copy. The Skills CLI needs Node.js 22.20 or newer.
Our distribution carries all 38 pinned at 74ca5fe, so you can take one without taking the set:
npx skills@1 add aiescu/agent-skills --skill grill-with-docs
Matt's skills or Superpowers?
They are opposites on purpose, and both are in our list.
Superpowers owns the lifecycle: a session hook injects its entry-point skill into every conversation, and the process runs from intent to ship. Matt's repository is explicitly against that. Nothing injects itself; you reach for one skill and put it back.
Pick by what fails in your work. If your agent charges ahead before intent is settled, you want the framework. If your agent is fine and you just need a sharper interview, a diagnosis loop or a clean handoff, you want the toolbox.
Both are the same underlying skill: getting useful work out of a system that answers instantly and confidently whether or not it understood you. That skill transfers — our guide to technical interviews with GeekBye covers the version of it you perform live, under time pressure, with someone watching.
Installing both surfaces a detail only a large namespace exposes. Our distribution carries 992 upstream skill packages, and 18 of them needed an owner prefix to coexist, across 9 upstream names that two repositories had both claimed: test-driven-development, skill-creator, mcp-builder, brand-guidelines, canvas-design, internal-comms, slack-gif-creator, theme-factory and webapp-testing.
Test-driven development is the instructive one. Two repositories shipped a skill called test-driven-development, so both were renamed — obra-test-driven-development and addyosmani-test-driven-development — and no plain version of that name exists in the distribution at all. Matt's TDD skill is unaffected, because upstream he called it tdd. Three houses, three procedures, one idea.
FAQ
What is mattpocock/skills?
Skills for Real Engineers is a collection of 38 MIT-licensed agent skills by Matt Pocock, taken from his own .agents directory. Each skill is a standalone Markdown procedure for one job — grilling a plan, running TDD, diagnosing a bug, handing off a session.
What does grill-with-docs do?
It runs a relentless interview against a plan or design to expose the gaps, and writes architecture decision records and a glossary into the repository as it goes. grill-me is the same interview without the documents.
Is it free? Yes. MIT-licensed: free to use, modify and redistribute, including commercially, with the licence and copyright preserved.
Which agents does it support?
Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode. The npx skills@1 add mattpocock/skills route uses the Skills CLI, which states it targets 70 or more agents and requires Node.js 22.20 or newer.
Can I install it alongside Superpowers?
Yes, and we do. They overlap on TDD and code review, which is why our distribution gives 18 packages an owner prefix — including both skills that were called test-driven-development. The conflict to avoid is not between repositories but within one: never install the same repository through both the plugin and the CLI.
Do I need all 38?
No. Each is a standalone file — npx skills@1 add aiescu/agent-skills --skill grill-with-docs takes one. ask-matt exists to tell you which one you actually want.
The ten skill collections we use every day
Skills for Real Engineers is second in a list of ten that we keep ranked by stars fetched weekly from the GitHub API, never typed by hand. The other nine cover full methodologies, design taste, output discipline, token cost and app automation.
The same repository records the three products we build with those skills: GeekBye, the real-time interview assistant; Keebye, push-to-talk dictation for people who drive coding agents; and Pavleur, an AI meeting copilot for Mac — each with the skills that did the work.
The full list, install commands and licence records: github.com/aiescu/agent-skills
