Matt Pocock's small, composable agent skills for engineering work, such as grilling sessions, TDD, bug diagnosis, specs and code review.
Free tool inAgent skills and plugins
Skills For Real Engineers (Matt Pocock) at a glance
Checked 18 Oct 2026A collection of Markdown agent skills by Matt Pocock: user-invoked ones such as /grill-me, /grill-with-docs, /to-spec, /triage and /implement, and model-invoked ones such as tdd, diagnosing-bugs, code-review and domain-modeling. Installs as a plugin for Claude Code, Codex and GitHub Copilot, via Gemini CLI, or via the skills CLI for Cursor and others; a setup skill asks for your issue tracker and labels. You need a coding agent and its paid plan or API key. MIT licence. Free add-on; it does not replace a paid product.
RepoQuarry. “Skills For Real Engineers (Matt Pocock).” Checked 18 Oct 2026. https://repoquarry.dev/projects/mattpocock-skillsWhat it replaces
Nothing people pay for: it’s a free tool, listed because people search for it. Find similar projects in Agent skills and plugins.
Facts, with sources
Every answer links to where we found it. We read the documentation; we did not install it.
A plugin updates itself. skills.sh copies editable files into your project, and you update them by hand.github.com · skills#readme ↗ 3d ago
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this softwaregithub.com · LICENSE ↗ 3d ago
I built these skills as a way to fix common failure modes I see with Claude Code, Codex, and other coding agents.github.com · skills#readme ↗ 3d ago
claude plugin install mattpocock-skills@claude-plugins-officialgithub.com · skills#readme ↗ 3d ago
No licence changes since we started watching. Licence watch: follow Skills For Real Engineers (Matt Pocock) and we email you if its licence terms change.
Growth and activity in detail
Is it popular, and is anyone still working on it? From GitHub.
- Actively maintained4 people committing, active 9 of the last 12 weeks.
4 people committing in the last 12 months · 27 pull requests merged in 30 days · 132 issues opened, 454 closed in 30 days
Stars over time
Building history+2,943 stars since 18 Oct 2026. The 7-day comparison and the trend label start once there is a full week of daily counts.
- Skills For Real Engineers (Matt Pocock)
Tracked daily since 18 Oct 2026. Dashed history: estimated from public records of when people starred the repo. Lines connect observations only; gaps contain no measured points.
Commits per week, last 52 weeks
active 9 of the last 12 weeksDown 31% on the 12 weeks before.
Where these numbers come from
- Stars, forks, releases: GitHub's public API, fetched every night (last fetch today).
- Star history: counted every night since 18 Oct 2026.
- Commits and people committing: GitHub's repository statistics, counted weekly. Names are never stored.
- Pull requests and issues: counted from GitHub for the last 30 days.
- Stars show popularity, not quality. The facts below are checked separately, by reading the project's own documentation. How we check.