mattpocock/skills is a repo where Matt Pocock, a TypeScript educator, opened up his own .claude directory for others to use. It holds around 36 Claude Code skills, grouped into categories. The idea is small tools you copy and adapt to yourself, not an enforced framework. It has over 160,000 GitHub stars. It is the third in this series of trending-skill-repo reviews, after superpowers and karpathy skills.
This is the third repo I opened in a run of trending Claude Code skill repos. The first two were superpowers and karpathy skills. This one is mattpocock/skills, over 160,000 stars. Its description is blunt and a little funny: "Skills for Real Engineers. Straight from my .claude directory."
That line is the whole thing. This one was not designed as a product for others from the start. It is the directory Matt actually works out of, opened up for others to copy. Matt Pocock is a well-known TypeScript educator, so the skills here carry the smell of someone who has written code for a long time, not theory.
This post goes in order: what it is and why the stars, then the skills that genuinely stand out, then a look at how the three repos I reviewed are each a different pole and which to reach for, and finally how to install it and how I use it myself.
Soon after this review the repo shipped v1.1, so we synced our fork. The change worth calling out: wayfinder (a plan-before-you-build skill) graduated from in-progress to a full engineering skill, and we pulled it into our working set. The planning skills were reorganized: to-prd
became to-spec
and to-issues
became to-tickets
(expand-contract slicing), diagnose
was renamed diagnosing-bugs
, and caveman was dropped. Every lesson in this review still holds; the repo just got sharper.
This one differs from the other two in that it does not try to be a product. It is a real working folder, opened up. Inside are around 36 skills, grouped into categories. The interesting part is that it separates what is ready for others from what is still a personal experiment. The engineering and productivity categories are the polished ones; categories like in-progress or personal are the unfinished stuff kept local. That layout tells anyone reaching in which skills to trust.
Why 160,000 stars? Because it answers a very direct curiosity: people want to see how a strong engineer actually configures their AI, not generic advice but the thing used in daily work. And Matt made it easy to take, with both an automatic installer and a symlink method that keeps you in sync with the repo.
If you came looking for exactly what skills live in mattpocock/skills
, here are the polished groups, read straight from the SKILL.md files in the repo. Two categories; the private in-progress category is not shipped for use, so the whole repo counts to around 36.
Engineering (14) ask-matt, grill-with-docs, triage, improve-codebase-architecture, setup-matt-pocock-skills, to-issues, to-prd, prototype, diagnosing-bugs, research, tdd, domain-modeling, codebase-design, code-review
Productivity (5) grill-me, handoff, teach, writing-great-skills, grilling The four I walk through below are diagnosing-bugs, tdd, grilling, and codebase-design, the ones that most smell of real work.
Reading the real files, several carry the clear smell of lived work. Four worth calling out.
What they share is that they come from real pain, not tidy rules. Each skill exists because a problem showed up often enough to be worth writing a response to. Reading them feels like looking over the notebook of someone who has been through a lot of work.
Having reviewed all three, the picture is clear: each answers a different need, they are not competing head-on.
Sorted by style of use: superpowers is for those who want a ready-made system with rails, karpathy is for those who want the leanest mental model, and mattpocock is for those who like to assemble their own, taking one piece at a time. The three do not clash. You could take karpathy's 4 principles as a base, add standout skills from mattpocock, and borrow superpowers' trick of naming the excuse to make the rules actually hold.
It is worth a try, especially if you want to see well-written skills from someone doing real work. You can install it several ways: run npx skills add mattpocock/skills
and a setup command, or clone and symlink so it stays in sync with the repo. The upside is you can take one skill at a time, not the whole set. Start with the one that matches what you do most.
Even without installing the repo, its most distilled lesson is this: a good skill comes from real pain, not from sitting down to invent something that might be nice to have. When you find yourself telling the AI the same thing the same way every time, that is the signal to pack it into a skill. Matt's way is not to wait for it to be perfect: write it rough, use it, refine it, and only promote it to something shareable once it settles.
For my part, I compared these against the skills I already use and borrowed the shape of a few, rather than installing the whole set, since many are tied to TypeScript work that does not match mine every day. How I pick and blend them into my own stack is a detail I am leaving out of this post, but the lesson above you can use right away.
If you remember one thing from this post, let it be this: **the best AI tools for you are usually the ones you assemble yourself.** Someone else's repo is valuable as an example and a starting point, not as something to swallow whole. Take what fits your work, drop what does not, and it becomes your own set.
Originally published at productize.life/blog/mattpocock-skills. Written from real work, the process, not a pitch.