What it is: mattpocock/skills is a collection of agent skills that Matt Pocock, an independent TypeScript teacher, wrote for his own work with Claude Code and Codex. The repository calls them "Skills for Real Engineers. Straight from my .agents directory" and describes them as small, adaptable and composable. They use the common SKILL.md format and are not made by Anthropic.
What's inside: 27 skills in two groups, engineering and productivity. The best known is grill-me: the agent interviews you about a plan or design before writing code. Others cover test-driven development (tdd), bug hunting (diagnosing-bugs), turning ideas into specs and tickets (to-spec, to-tickets), implement, code-review, pr and handoff between sessions. Some run only when you type them; others are picked up by the model on its own.
Traction: on GitHub's trending list the repository gained about 9,600 stars in a week and now has about 317,000, with 26,500 forks. It has no Hacker News discussion of its own this month; guides from sites such as SSD Nodes explain which skills to install.
How to try it: in Claude Code, run claude plugin install mattpocock-skills@claude-plugins-official; for Codex, Copilot, Gemini CLI, Cursor and other agents use npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills. Then run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once per repository. The licence is MIT.
Limits: skills can be renamed or removed between releases (v1.3 dropped one), plugin installs can't hide single skills, and model-invoked skills add to the context on every turn. SSD Nodes warns that grill-me needs its helper grilling: installed alone, it may start writing code instead of asking questions. Don't install by both routes, or every skill appears twice.
