One email each morning — yesterday's AI, sortedGet it in your inbox

METAL LAB

mattpocock/skills

★ 224,352+1,894 todayShell

A pack of reusable prompt playbooks that keep AI coding agents like Claude Code from going off the rails

mattpocock/skills is a collection of 'skill' files that guide AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, etc.) to interview you before coding, share consistent project terminology, run test-driven development loops, and periodically review codebase architecture. Each skill is a small, editable instruction document rather than a rigid all-in-one framework. It can be installed as a managed Claude Code plugin or copied into a project as editable files via the skills.sh installer.

What it does

  1. Targets four common failure modes with AI coding agents: misunderstanding what you want, overly verbose responses, code that doesn't actually work, and codebases that turn into unmanageable messes over time.
  2. Skills like /grill-me and /grill-with-docs make the agent interrogate you about your plan before writing code, and /grill-with-docs also builds a shared CONTEXT.md vocabulary and ADR (architecture decision record) documents so agent responses get shorter and more precise over time.
  3. The /tdd skill enforces a red-green-refactor loop (write a failing test, then fix it) so the agent gets consistent feedback instead of guessing, while /diagnosing-bugs applies a disciplined step-by-step debugging process.
  4. /improve-codebase-architecture periodically scans a codebase for places where the design could be simplified ('deepening opportunities') and presents them as an HTML report, though the author notes it's a survey tool, not an automatic fixer for old, tangled code.
  5. Skills are split into 'user-invoked' ones you type explicitly (like /triage or /to-spec) and 'model-invoked' ones the agent can call automatically when relevant (like tdd or code-review), and installation is available via Claude Code plugin (auto-updating, read-only) or the skills.sh CLI (editable, forkable files).

Why it matters

As AI coding agents become a bigger part of everyday software work, having a lightweight, model-agnostic set of practices to keep them aligned, disciplined, and architecture-aware matters more than another rigid AI framework that takes control away from the developer. With 224,352 stars, this repo is being widely adopted as a practical reference for how experienced engineers actually structure their AI-agent workflows.

Terms in this repo

  • Claude Code plugin · Anthropic의 코딩 에이전트 Claude Code에 통째로 설치되는, 자동 업데이트되는 읽기 전용 확장 기능 묶음
  • skills.sh · skill 파일들을 프로젝트에 직접 복사해 넣어 사용자가 편집할 수 있게 해주는 설치 도구
  • red-green-refactor · 실패하는 테스트를 먼저 작성한 뒤(red) 통과시키고(green) 코드를 정리하는(refactor) 테스트 주도 개발 절차
  • ADR (Architecture Decision Record) · 설계 관련 결정과 그 이유를 기록해두는 문서 형식
  • CONTEXT.md · 프로젝트에서 쓰는 전문 용어와 도메인 개념을 정리해 에이전트와 사람이 같은 언어로 소통하게 돕는 문서

Repository description (English)

Skills for Real Engineers. Straight from my .agents directory.

Open on GitHub

Trending repos

All repos →

Latest from METAL LAB