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Forked from and built on Matt Pocock's skills. Matt is the original author; see Credits.

My agent skills for real engineering, not vibe coding: a curated library plus my own cross-project and per-repo skills, linked into every project on my machine.

Developing real applications is hard. Approaches like GSD, BMAD, and Spec-Kit try to help by owning the process. But while doing so, they take away your control and make bugs in the process hard to resolve.

These skills are designed to be small, easy to adapt, and composable. They work with any model. Hack around with them. Make them your own.

Clone the repo and run the reconcile linker. It mirrors every shippable skill into ~/.claude/skills, installs the helper scripts into ~/.local/bin, and registers git hooks so the link layer re-syncs itself on every pull.

git clone https://github.com/thatssoheil/skills.git
cd skills
bash scripts/link-skills.sh          # link skills + install bin/ + register hooks
bash scripts/link-skills.sh --check  # verify the mirror is in sync

personal/ and projects/<repo>/ are linked globally; deprecated/ and in-progress/ are skipped. Editing a skill's body is live immediately; adding, renaming, or removing one re-syncs automatically via the hooks (or just re-run the script).

Prefer the skills.sh installer? npx skills@latest add thatssoheil/skills pulls the public set declared in .claude-plugin/plugin.json (the Matt-derived library) but not my personal//projects/ skills. The clone + reconcile path above is how I actually use it.

The philosophy below is Matt Pocock's, in his own words. It is why these skills exist, and why I forked them. I've adapted and extended the set for my own workflow; the thinking is his.

Matt built these skills as a way to fix common failure modes he saw with Claude Code, Codex, and other coding agents.

"No-one knows exactly what they want"

David Thomas & Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer

The Problem. The most common failure mode in software development is misalignment. You think the dev knows what you want. Then you see what they've built - and you realize it didn't understand you at all.

This is just the same in the AI age. There is a communication gap between you and the agent. The fix for this is a grilling session - getting the agent to ask you detailed questions about what you're building.

The Fix is to use:

• /grill-me - for non-code uses
• /grill-with-docs - same as /grill-me, but adds more goodies (see below)

These are my most popular skills. They help you align with the agent before you get started, and think deeply about the change you're making. Use them every time you want to make a change.

With a ubiquitous language, conversations among developers and expressions of the code are all derived from the same domain model.

Eric Evans, Domain-Driven-Design

The Problem: At the start of a project, devs and the people they're building the software for (the domain experts) are usually speaking different languages.

I felt the same tension with my agents. Agents are usually dropped into a project and asked to figure out the jargon as they go. So they use 20 words where 1 will do.

The Fix for this is a shared language. It's a document that helps agents decode the jargon used in the project.

This is built into /grill-with-docs. It's a grilling session, but that helps you build a shared language with the AI, and document hard-to-explain decisions in ADR's.

It's hard to explain how powerful this is. It might be the single coolest technique in this repo. Try it, and see.

"Always take small, deliberate steps. The rate of feedback is your speed limit. Never take on a task that’s too big."

David Thomas & Andrew Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmer

The Problem: Let's say that you and the agent are aligned on what to build. What happens when the agent still produces crap?

It's time to look at your feedback loops. Without feedback on how the code it produces actually runs, the agent will be flying blind.

The Fix: You need the usual tranche of feedback loops: static types, browser access, and automated tests.

For automated tests, a red-green-refactor loop is critical. This is where the agent writes a failing test first, then fixes the test. This helps give the agent a consistent level of feedback that results in far better code.

I've built a /tdd skill you can slot into any project. It encourages red-green-refactor and gives the agent plenty of guidance on what makes good and bad tests.

For debugging, I've also built a /diagnosing-bugs skill that wraps best debugging practices into a simple loop.

"Invest in the design of the system every day."

Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained

"The best modules are deep. They allow a lot of functionality to be accessed through a simple interface."

John Ousterhout, A Philosophy Of Software Design

The Problem: Most apps built with agents are complex and hard to change. Because agents can radically speed up coding, they also accelerate software entropy. Codebases get more complex at an unprecedented rate.

The Fix for this is a radical new approach to AI-powered development: caring about the design of the code.

This is built in to every layer of these skills:

• /to-prd quizzes you about which modules you're touching before creating a PRD

And crucially, /improve-codebase-architecture helps you rescue a codebase that has become a ball of mud. I recommend running it on your codebase once every few days.

Software engineering fundamentals matter more than ever. These skills are my best effort at condensing these fundamentals into repeatable practices, to help you ship the best apps of your career. Enjoy.

These split on one axis — who can invoke them. User-invoked skills are reachable only when you type them (e.g. /grill-me); their job is to orchestrate. Model-invoked skills can be invoked by you or reached for automatically by the agent when the task fits; they hold the reusable discipline. A user-invoked skill may invoke model-invoked skills, but never another user-invoked one.

Skills I use daily for code work.

User-invoked

• ask-matt — Ask which skill or flow fits your situation. A router over the user-invoked skills in this repo.
• grill-with-docs — Grilling session that also builds your project's domain model, sharpening terminology and updating CONTEXT.md and ADRs inline.
• triage — Move issues through a state machine of triage roles.
• improve-codebase-architecture — Scan a codebase for deepening opportunities, present them as a visual HTML report, then grill through whichever one you pick.
• setup-matt-pocock-skills — Configure this repo for the engineering skills (issue tracker, triage labels, domain doc layout). Run once per repo before using the other engineering skills.
• to-issues — Break any plan, spec, or PRD into independently-grabbable issues using vertical slices.
• to-prd — Turn the current conversation into a PRD and publish it to the issue tracker. No interview — just synthesizes what you've already discussed.

Model-invoked

• prototype — Build a throwaway prototype to answer a design question — a runnable terminal app for state/logic questions, or several radically different UI variations toggleable from one route.
• diagnosing-bugs — Disciplined diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions: reproduce → minimise → hypothesise → instrument → fix → regression-test.
• tdd — Test-driven development with a red-green-refactor loop. Builds features or fixes bugs one vertical slice at a time.
• domain-modeling — Actively build and sharpen a project's domain model — challenge terms against the glossary, stress-test with edge-case scenarios, and update CONTEXT.md and ADRs inline.
• codebase-design — Shared discipline and vocabulary for designing deep modules: a lot of behaviour behind a small interface, placed at a clean seam, testable through that interface.
• frontend-design — Create distinctive, production-grade frontend interfaces with high design quality. Use when building web components, pages, or applications that avoid generic AI aesthetics.

General workflow tools, not code-specific.

User-invoked

• grill-me — Get relentlessly interviewed about a plan or design until every branch of the decision tree is resolved.
• handoff — Compact the current conversation into a handoff document so another agent can continue the work.
• teach — Teach the user a new skill or concept over multiple sessions, using the current directory as a stateful teaching workspace.
• writing-great-skills — Reference for writing and editing skills well: the vocabulary and principles that make a skill predictable.

Model-invoked

• grilling — Interview the user relentlessly about a plan or design until every branch of the decision tree is resolved. The reusable loop behind grill-me and grill-with-docs.

Tools I keep around but rarely use.

• git-guardrails-claude-code — Set up Claude Code hooks to block dangerous git commands (push, reset --hard, clean, etc.) before they execute.
• migrate-to-shoehorn — Migrate test files from as type assertions to @total-typescript/shoehorn.
• scaffold-exercises — Create exercise directory structures with sections, problems, solutions, and explainers.
• setup-pre-commit — Set up Husky pre-commit hooks with lint-staged, Prettier, type checking, and tests.

My own skills, linked globally by scripts/link-skills.sh but kept out of the public plugin manifest (.claude-plugin/plugin.json).

Projects (per-repo, hard-scoped to their repo)

• climic/start-worktree-climic: One-session worktree feature flow across the climic repos (muse-frontend / muse-landing), with human-approved commits/pushes confined to the worktree and create-only MRs.
• muse-frontend/new-form: Scaffold or migrate a muse-frontend form the canonical way (useForm + zodResolver, onBlur, locale-aware Zod fields).
• muse-frontend/new-route: Add a muse-frontend route without breaking the page-title registry coverage test.
• muse-landing/add-i18n-string: Add, rename, or remove a muse-landing UI string keeping the type-safe i18n contract in sync.

Personal (cross-project)

• oss-hunt: End-to-end open-source contribution flow across my anchor repos — hunt a reproducible issue, report, brainstorm the fix, then human-gate the fork/push/PR.
• start-worktree: Gated, dev-based worktree flow for any repo without its own start-worktree-* skill — always branches off dev, auto-detects the toolchain, then gates every remote action (push, MR→dev, release MR dev→main).

Originally created by Matt Pocock as mattpocock/skills. Follow his work and newsletter at aihero.dev. The Engineering, Productivity, and Misc skills, and the philosophy above, are his.

This fork by thatssoheil adds:

• a reconcile-based global linker (scripts/link-skills.sh) that keeps ~/.claude/skills an exact mirror (prune + collision-guard + --check)
• git hooks (post-merge / post-checkout) that auto-resync the link layer
• vendored worktree helpers in bin/
• personal/ and projects/<repo>/ buckets for my own cross-project and per-repo skills

thatssoheil.website · @thatssoheil