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Use Matt Pocock’s skills: a practical guide for developers
The agent ships a feature. You open the diff and it solved a different problem: it called a stock reservation a “lock,” tested a private method, and never agreed what “done” meant.
Matt Pocock’s skills are small markdown playbooks from his own agent setup. They do not replace your model. They force the habits that stop that miss: agree the words, write the decision down, slice the work so each piece can be demoed, then build one slice with a failing test first. This guide installs them and walks one feature through the chain you will actually reuse.
Commands and file names below match the repo’s engineering docs on main as of October 2026. The repo moves quickly (old names such as /to-prd and /diagnose are already gone). If a slash command does not appear, check the skill docs and the README before you improvise.
What you’ll learn
- Install one copy of the skills on Claude Code or Cursor, then run setup once per repo.
- Take a fuzzy feature from an interview to a spec, tracer-bullet tickets, and one implementation commit.
- Skip the long chain when the change is small, and switch to diagnosis or a multi-session map when it is not.









