Most devs using Claude Code write their instructions from scratch — or they don’t write any at all. Matt Pocock just published his complete .claude directory so you don’t have to.
mattpocock/skills is a collection of skills for Claude Code. It hit #1 on GitHub Trending and sits at 75.7K stars. The repo description says it straight: “Skills for Real Engineers.” It’s not marketing — it’s a deliberate contrast with vibe coding, where you describe what you want and hope the model figures it out.
Each skill in this collection does exactly one thing.
What’s in the collection
The skills are organized into four areas:
Planning and design — before touching a line of code:
write-a-prd— Runs an interactive interview, explores your codebase, and archives the resulting PRD directly as a GitHub issue.prd-to-issues— Takes that PRD and breaks it into independent GitHub issues, cut into vertical slices.grill-me— Interrogates you about your plan until every branch of the decision tree is resolved. Useful when you know what you want to build but haven’t fully thought it through yet.
Development — writing, refactoring, fixing:
tdd— Red-green-refactor loop. Builds features or fixes bugs one vertical slice at a time. This is the central skill in the collection — TDD-first is non-negotiable in Pocock’s workflow.triage-issue— Investigates a bug by exploring the codebase, identifies the root cause, and archives a GitHub issue with a TDD-based fix plan. Structured debugging, not vibing until something compiles.improve-codebase-architecture— Hunts for architectural improvement opportunities: shallow modules, testability gaps, vertical slice candidates.
Tooling and setup:
setup-pre-commit— Configures pre-commit hooks with Husky, lint-staged, Prettier, type checking, and tests.git-guardrails-claude-code— Sets up Claude Code hooks to block dangerous git commands (push to main,reset --hard,clean, etc.) before they execute.
Writing Skills:
write-a-skill— Creates new skills using the same structure as the collection. Pocock included the meta-skill so you can extend the system.
How to install it
The repo includes a .claude-plugin directory, which means it works directly with Claude Code’s plugin system. Clone it and run:
claude mcp add mattpocock-skills
Or copy the skills/ directory manually into your own .claude directory if you prefer full control over what you include.
The skills themselves are plain text files — readable, auditable, and easy to modify. No black boxes.
Why it matters
Pocock is known for ts-reset, total-typescript, and years of TypeScript education. He’s not an AI tooling creator — he’s a developer who uses Claude Code as part of his real workflow and decided to share the exact configuration that makes it useful.
That provenance matters. These aren’t aspirational prompts written for a demo. They’re the instructions an active engineer uses to keep Claude Code on track — with mandatory TDD, structured planning before implementation, and guardrails around destructive git operations.
The git-guardrails-claude-code skill deserves special attention for teams. Agentic coding sessions accumulate state fast, and a reset --hard or direct push to main from an agent that misunderstood context is exactly the kind of incident that shuts down the experiment for an entire team. This skill hooks into Claude Code’s native hook system to intercept those commands before they execute.
The tradeoff to keep in mind
These skills are opinionated. The TDD-first workflow is non-negotiable in Pocock’s setup — if your codebase doesn’t have a test infrastructure you trust, tdd and triage-issue are going to feel like friction instead of structure. Same with write-a-prd: it archives directly to GitHub Issues, so you need that integration working.
The skills also assume a certain level of project maturity. They’re built for codebases with established conventions, not prototypes from scratch.