Skills for Real Engineers

Skills for Real Engineers is Matt Pocock's (Total TypeScript, AI Hero) public collection of agent skills, pulled straight from his own .agents directory. The philosophy is explicit: real engineering, not vibe coding — small, composable, model-agnostic skills based on decades of engineering practice (tracer bullets, TDD, ubiquitous language, deep modules). They target the common failure modes he sees in Claude Code, Codex, and other agents: agents not doing what's asked, excessive verbosity, broken code, and balls of mud. The repo is one of the most-starred agent-skill collections on GitHub (~240k stars), MIT-licensed, installable as a Claude Code plugin, with ~20M installs via skills.sh. A setup skill walks you through choosing an issue tracker, labels, and docs locations.

The honest picture: these are opinionated workflows from one engineer's practice — they impose process (specs, tickets, TDD) that can feel heavy for quick scripts or explorations. The skills assume you buy into the methodology; cherry-picking individual skills works but loses some coherence. As with any popular repo, verify you are installing from the genuine mattpocock/skills source, since forks and copycats exist.

Run npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills, pick skills and target agents, then run /setup-matt-pocock-skills in your agent to configure tracker and labels.