Matt Pocock Skills
Installs Matt Pocock's engineering and productivity skills into Agent Zero — TDD, code review, bug diagnosis, spec and ticket flows, domain modelling, grilling, teach and handoff among 25 skills, each with a matching slash command. Upstream is fetched at install time and can be re-synced on demand, so new skills arrive without manual work.
README
Matt Pocock Skills for Agent Zero
Agent Zero plugin that installs mattpocock/skills — Skills for Real Engineers — into your Agent Zero skill library, and registers a slash command for every skill.
What you get
| 25 skills | Engineering (tdd, code-review, diagnosing-bugs, to-spec, to-tickets, wayfinder, wizard, …) and productivity (grilling, teach, handoff, …) |
| 25 slash commands | Same names as upstream: /tdd, /to-spec, /grilling, /handoff, … |
| Zero-maintenance updates | Upstream changes arrive on the next plugin update — no manual sync |
Two upstream skills are intentionally excluded: setup-matt-pocock-skills
(installs a Claude Code harness that does not exist here) and ask-matt
(points at external paid content).
Install
Install from this repository's URL via Plugins → Install from Git. The
installer clones this repo, then runs the plugin's install() hook, which:
git clone --depth 1of upstream at the ref inupstream.yaml- verifies the clone contains usable skills (refuses to swap otherwise)
- atomically swaps it into the plugin's
vendor/cache - copies each skill into
/a0/usr/skills/, tagged with an ownership marker - regenerates the matching slash commands in
/a0/usr/plugins/_commands/commands/ - records the resolved upstream commit in
upstream.yaml
Requirements: network access to GitHub during install and update, plus git
(already present in Agent Zero).
Updates
Click Update on the plugin. The framework pulls this repository and then
re-runs install(), which re-fetches upstream and re-syncs everything. If
upstream itself has not changed, you get the same skills with a fresh commit
record. There is nothing to bump by hand.
Re-syncing without a plugin update
Agent Zero only offers the Update button when this repository has new commits. If upstream changes but this repository does not, no update appears — even though the skills are stale. For that case, open the plugin's screen (Open in the plugin list, or the plugin's main page) and press Re-sync upstream now.
That button calls POST /api/plugins/mattpocock_skills/sync_upstream, which runs
the same fetch → verify → swap → sync pipeline as install(), then reports the
resolved upstream commit, version, skill count and command count.
To follow a different ref (e.g. a tag) or a fork, edit upstream.yaml:",
repo: https://github.com/mattpocock/skills.git
ref: main
Failure behaviour
Nothing is deleted until a new clone has been fetched and verified. If the
fetch fails and a previous cache exists, that cache is reused and the recorded
resolved_commit is left at the last known-good value. If there is no cache
either, the install fails loudly rather than leaving you with missing skills.
Your own skills are never touched: a skill directory without a
.mattpocock_skills.json marker is treated as user-owned and skipped.
Uninstall
Removes exactly what it created — the 25 skills (by marker), the 25 slash
commands (by marker), and the vendor/ cache. Skills of yours that happen to
share a name are left alone.
Files
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
plugin.yaml |
Manifest |
hooks.py |
install() / pre_update() / uninstall() lifecycle |
helpers/upstream.py |
Fetch, verify, swap, sync, remove |
helpers/commands_sync.py |
Slash-command generation and removal |
upstream.yaml |
Which repo/ref to follow, and the last resolved commit |
License
Plugin code: MIT (see LICENSE). The skills fetched at install time are
MIT © Matt Pocock; their notice is preserved in LICENSE.