Agent Skills

Each skill is a Markdown file that tells an agent how to handle a specific job. Unlike frameworks that take over the whole process, these are meant to be small, easy to adapt, and model-agnostic, so you can hack on them and make them your own.

Scott

08 Nov 2026 — 2 min read

Matt Pocock's Skills: Teaching Your AI Coding Agent to Engineer, Not Vibe

AI coding agents are fast, but fast isn't the same as good. Matt Pocock's Skills repo is his answer: a set of small, composable instructions that push agents like Claude Code and Codex toward real engineering habits. Its GitHub repository has passed 300,000 stars.

What it is

Skills is an MIT-licensed collection of the agent skills Pocock says he uses every day, "straight from my .agents directory." Each skill is a Markdown file that tells an agent how to handle a specific job. Unlike frameworks that take over the whole process, these are meant to be small, easy to adapt, and model-agnostic, so you can hack on them and make them your own.

Key features

Grilling sessions. /grill-me and /grill-with-docs have the agent interview you about what you're building before it writes anything. Pocock calls them his most popular skills.
Shared language. /grill-with-docs builds a project glossary and decision records, so the agent stops using 20 words where one will do.
Tight feedback loops. /tdd enforces red-green-refactor testing, and /diagnosing-bugs wraps debugging into a disciplined, phase-by-phase loop.
Design that lasts. /improve-codebase-architecture surveys a codebase for ways to simplify it, and /code-review checks a diff against both your standards and the original spec.
Productivity extras. /handoff compacts a conversation so another agent can pick it up, and /teach turns a folder into a multi-session lesson.

Why it matters

Agents can speed up coding, but they also speed up the mess. Pocock built these skills to fix the failure modes he kept hitting: agents that misunderstand the task, ramble, ship broken code, or pile up complexity. If you lean on coding agents and want them to follow engineering fundamentals instead of guessing, this is a practical, free place to start.

Getting started

Claude Code users can run claude plugin install mattpocock-skills@claude-plugins-official. Codex, GitHub Copilot, and Gemini CLI have their own install commands in the README, and any other agent (Cursor, OpenCode, Windsurf and more) can use npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills. Then run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once per repo to pick your issue tracker, triage labels, and docs location.

View the repo on GitHub: github.com/mattpocock/skills

aihero.dev/skills · skills.sh listing