Snapshot 2026-08-07 09:25:51 UTC · version 1
Navigation across mattpocock/skills with measured metrics: 101 markdown files out of 151, 88% of the repo by bytes, 35 SKILL.md across five buckets. Covers the promotion contract, the user-invoked vs model-invoked split, the AGENTS.md symlink trick and a single MIT license zone.
mattpocock/skills is Matt Pocock's working .agents directory, published as-is: "Skills for Real Engineers." It is not a library — it is a set of instructions an AI coding agent loads and follows.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Files (blobs) | 151 |
Of which .md |
101 (66% of files, 88% of bytes) — 580,210 B |
SKILL.md files |
35, across five buckets |
Human docs pages (docs/) |
25 files, 249,917 B |
| License | MIT © Matt Pocock — one zone, no nested exceptions |
| Created / last push | 3 Feb 2026 / 6 Aug 2026 |
| Stars / forks | 207,868 / 17,946 |
Skills live under skills/<bucket>/<name>/SKILL.md. The bucket decides whether a skill is promoted — shipped in the plugin, listed in the README, and given a docs page.
| Bucket | Count | Status |
|---|---|---|
engineering/ |
18 | Promoted — daily code work |
productivity/ |
7 | Promoted — daily non-code workflow |
misc/ |
4 | Kept, not promoted |
in-progress/ |
6 | Beta, public on purpose, feedback wanted |
deprecated/ |
0 | No longer used |
engineering: ask-matt, code-review, codebase-design, diagnosing-bugs, domain-modeling, grill-with-docs, implement, improve-codebase-architecture, prototype, research, resolving-merge-conflicts, setup-matt-pocock-skills, tdd, to-spec, to-tickets, triage, wayfinder, wizard
productivity: grill-me, grilling, handoff, teach, to-questionnaire, wait-what, writing-for-agents
1. One file, two names. AGENTS.md is a 9-byte symlink pointing at CLAUDE.md. Claude Code reads one name, Codex-style agents read the other, and there is only ever one file to maintain — no drift between two copies of the same rules.
2. A shared vocabulary file. CONTEXT.md is a domain glossary: it defines Issue tracker, Issue, Decision ticket and Triage role, lists the synonyms to avoid, and records ambiguities that were resolved (for example, "backlog" used to mean both the tool and the body of work — the tool is now always the Issue tracker). Agent and human end up speaking one language instead of drifting.
3. Two invocation modes, declared explicitly. Every SKILL.md is either user-invoked — reachable only by a human via slash command, enforced with disable-model-invocation: true plus a policy flag — or model-invoked, which the agent may trigger on its own. Nothing is ambiguous about who can fire what.
CLAUDE.md is not prose; it is a set of invariants that keep the repository from rotting:
skill in engineering/ or productivity/ → MUST appear in top-level README.md
→ MUST appear in .claude-plugin/plugin.json
→ MUST have a docs page at docs/<bucket>/<name>.md
skill in misc/, in-progress/, deprecated/ → MUST NOT appear in either
Docs pages carry four fixed sections: What it does, When to reach for it, Common questions, It's working if. Install instructions are copied verbatim from a single source block, so they cannot drift between README and docs.
ask-matt is the router: it maps every user-reachable skill and how they relate. The repository states the rule plainly — a router that never mentions a new skill, or still routes to a removed one, is a router that lies.
One LICENSE at the root: MIT © Matt Pocock, 2026. No nested license files, no copyleft subtree, no vendored third-party code with a different holder. Reuse is straightforward — which is not the case for every skills pack.
File sizes and modes come from the Git Trees API (/repos/mattpocock/skills/git/trees/main?recursive=1, 240 entries, truncated: false). Skill counts were derived by grouping every path ending in SKILL.md by its bucket directory. Token figures are a heuristic of one token per four characters. Relative links in every published snapshot are rewritten to absolute GitHub URLs pinned to the source commit.
Data captured 7 August 2026.
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Snapshot 2026-08-07 09:25:51 UTC · version 1
Navigation across mattpocock/skills with measured metrics: 101 markdown files out of 151, 88% of the repo by bytes, 35 SKILL.md across five buckets. Covers the promotion contract, the user-invoked vs model-invoked split, the AGENTS.md symlink trick and a single MIT license zone.
mattpocock/skills is Matt Pocock's working .agents directory, published as-is: "Skills for Real Engineers." It is not a library — it is a set of instructions an AI coding agent loads and follows.
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Files (blobs) | 151 |
Of which .md |
101 (66% of files, 88% of bytes) — 580,210 B |
SKILL.md files |
35, across five buckets |
Human docs pages (docs/) |
25 files, 249,917 B |
| License | MIT © Matt Pocock — one zone, no nested exceptions |
| Created / last push | 3 Feb 2026 / 6 Aug 2026 |
| Stars / forks | 207,868 / 17,946 |
Skills live under skills/<bucket>/<name>/SKILL.md. The bucket decides whether a skill is promoted — shipped in the plugin, listed in the README, and given a docs page.
| Bucket | Count | Status |
|---|---|---|
engineering/ |
18 | Promoted — daily code work |
productivity/ |
7 | Promoted — daily non-code workflow |
misc/ |
4 | Kept, not promoted |
in-progress/ |
6 | Beta, public on purpose, feedback wanted |
deprecated/ |
0 | No longer used |
engineering: ask-matt, code-review, codebase-design, diagnosing-bugs, domain-modeling, grill-with-docs, implement, improve-codebase-architecture, prototype, research, resolving-merge-conflicts, setup-matt-pocock-skills, tdd, to-spec, to-tickets, triage, wayfinder, wizard
productivity: grill-me, grilling, handoff, teach, to-questionnaire, wait-what, writing-for-agents
1. One file, two names. AGENTS.md is a 9-byte symlink pointing at CLAUDE.md. Claude Code reads one name, Codex-style agents read the other, and there is only ever one file to maintain — no drift between two copies of the same rules.
2. A shared vocabulary file. CONTEXT.md is a domain glossary: it defines Issue tracker, Issue, Decision ticket and Triage role, lists the synonyms to avoid, and records ambiguities that were resolved (for example, "backlog" used to mean both the tool and the body of work — the tool is now always the Issue tracker). Agent and human end up speaking one language instead of drifting.
3. Two invocation modes, declared explicitly. Every SKILL.md is either user-invoked — reachable only by a human via slash command, enforced with disable-model-invocation: true plus a policy flag — or model-invoked, which the agent may trigger on its own. Nothing is ambiguous about who can fire what.
CLAUDE.md is not prose; it is a set of invariants that keep the repository from rotting:
skill in engineering/ or productivity/ → MUST appear in top-level README.md
→ MUST appear in .claude-plugin/plugin.json
→ MUST have a docs page at docs/<bucket>/<name>.md
skill in misc/, in-progress/, deprecated/ → MUST NOT appear in either
Docs pages carry four fixed sections: What it does, When to reach for it, Common questions, It's working if. Install instructions are copied verbatim from a single source block, so they cannot drift between README and docs.
ask-matt is the router: it maps every user-reachable skill and how they relate. The repository states the rule plainly — a router that never mentions a new skill, or still routes to a removed one, is a router that lies.
One LICENSE at the root: MIT © Matt Pocock, 2026. No nested license files, no copyleft subtree, no vendored third-party code with a different holder. Reuse is straightforward — which is not the case for every skills pack.
File sizes and modes come from the Git Trees API (/repos/mattpocock/skills/git/trees/main?recursive=1, 240 entries, truncated: false). Skill counts were derived by grouping every path ending in SKILL.md by its bucket directory. Token figures are a heuristic of one token per four characters. Relative links in every published snapshot are rewritten to absolute GitHub URLs pinned to the source commit.
Data captured 7 August 2026.
concept:developer-toolingorg:collider-club Sign in to join the discussion.