Skills For Real Engineers

Org fork — clone: · **SSH:**git@github.com:lukiIabs/skills.git` · Homepage: github.com/lukiIabs/skills · Upstream: mattpocock/skills · Maintainer: @whitevision11 · Org: lukiIabs
Discoverability: Cursor IDE, agent skills, SKILL.md, Claude, Codex, AI agents, MCP servers, Model Context Protocol, TypeScript, Node.js, prompts, prompt engineering, automation, developer tooling, VS Code, productivity, open source, GitHub, LLM tooling, npx installer

My agent skills that I use every day to do real engineering - not vibe coding.

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. They're based on decades of engineering experience. Hack around with them. Make them your own. Enjoy.

If you want to keep up with changes to these skills, and any new ones I create, you can join ~60,000 other devs on my newsletter:

Sign Up To The Newsletter

Quickstart (30-second setup)

1. Run the skills.sh installer:

npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

2. Pick the skills you want, and which coding agents you want to install them on. Make sure you select /setup-matt-pocock-skills.

3. Run /setup-matt-pocock-skills in your agent. It will:

   • Ask you which issue tracker you want to use (GitHub, Linear, or local files)
   • Ask you what labels you apply to ticks when you triage them (/triage uses labels)
   • Ask you where you want to save any docs we create

4. Bam - you're ready to go.

Repository tooling (TypeScript)

Maintenance scripts are TypeScript compiled with Node (typescript in devDependencies). From this repo root:

npm install
npm run build
npm run list-skills
npm run link-skills

Some skills (e.g. git guardrails) include hooks built to dist/ — see the skill’s SKILL.md.

Why These Skills Exist

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

#1: The Agent Didn't Do What I Want

"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](./skills/produ