I kept running into the same problem with coding agents: I would describe a task, the agent would build something, and it was not what I meant. Not broken — just off.

The fix turned out to be surprisingly low-tech. Matt Pocock published a repo of "skills" — small instruction files that go in your .claude directory and change how the agent approaches work. The repo exploded: 77,000+ stars, 6,700+ forks, #1 on GitHub Trending.

I installed it. Here is what I found.

Setup (About 60 Seconds)

npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills

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Pick the skills you want. Select /setup-matt-pocock-skills — it is the bootstrap.

Inside your agent:

/setup-matt-pocock-skills

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It asks your issue tracker (GitHub / Linear / local files), triage labels, and docs folder. Done.

Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or anything that reads .claude/ directories.

The 4 Skills I Actually Use

There are 28 skills.…