// the find
mattpocock/skills
Skills for Real Engineers. Straight from my .claude directory.
A collection of slash-command 'skills' for Claude Code and similar coding agents, written by Matt Pocock (Total TypeScript). The idea is that rather than letting the agent wing it, you install structured prompts that enforce specific workflows — grilling sessions, TDD loops, architecture reviews. Targeted at developers who are frustrated that AI coding assistants produce messes without guardrails.
The user/model-invoked split is a real design decision: orchestration skills that only you can trigger vs. reusable discipline skills the agent can reach for automatically — that's a sensible boundary that most prompt repos ignore. The grilling + domain modeling combo (`/grill-with-docs` + `CONTEXT.md`) addresses a real failure mode: agents produce inconsistently named code because they invent jargon on the fly. The `/tdd` skill enforcing red-green-refactor is the right answer to 'the agent writes code that doesn't work' rather than just telling people to add tests. The repo is eating its own cooking — it has `CONTEXT.md`, ADRs under `docs/adr/`, and a `.out-of-scope/` directory that documents what was deliberately excluded, which is more disciplined than most.
147k stars on a Shell repo that's mostly Markdown prompt files is almost entirely social graph (Matt has a massive TypeScript following), not a signal about technical depth. The skills are prompts in `.md` files — there's no validation that they actually work across different models, versions of Claude Code, or agent configurations, and the 'works with any model' claim is untested marketing. The installer (`npx skills@latest add`) adds a runtime dependency and an install step to what is essentially a directory of text files — `git clone` and copy would be simpler and more auditable. Several skills are in `skills/in-progress/` and `skills/deprecated/` with no indication of what broke or what they were replaced with, which means a new user has no idea which parts of the repo are actually production-quality.