Overview: Matt Pocock's Skills Framework
This framework provides a collection of composable, engineering-focused “skills” designed to help coding agents (like Claude Code) function more effectively by enforcing software engineering fundamentals.
Purpose
The skills aim to solve common failure modes in AI-assisted development:
- Misalignment: Bridging the communication gap between the developer and the agent through structured “grilling” sessions.
- Verbosity/Jargon: Reducing token waste and improving clarity by establishing a shared domain language.
- Poor Code Quality: Enforcing feedback loops (like red-green-refactor TDD) and disciplined debugging.
- System Complexity: Preventing “balls of mud” by encouraging modular design and architectural improvements.
Skill Categories
| Category | Skill Examples | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Engineering | grill-with-docs, tdd, code-review, diagnosing-bugs | Daily coding tasks, TDD loops, architectural design, and bug fixing. |
| Productivity | grill-me, handoff, teach | General workflow, interviewing the user for clarity, and maintaining state. |
Key Engineering Skills
- /grill-with-docs: Aligns the agent with the user while building a project domain model.
- /tdd: Executes a red-green-refactor loop.
- /improve-codebase-architecture: Scans for and helps resolve architectural decay.
- /code-review: Performs a two-axis review (Standards vs. Spec) using parallel sub-agents.