How it works: Matt Pocock's skills

Matt Pocock's skills

Matt Pocock teaches software engineering with AI, and his skills package the workflows he uses. Most are for building software; a few are useful for anyone.

They exist because of how Claude behaves left to itself. It agrees with you too readily, so a shaky plan comes back sounding fine; grill-me turns that around and goes looking for the holes. It starts doing before the question is clear, so you get a confident answer to the wrong question; wayfinder and the build route settle the decisions first. Long conversations lose detail as they fill up; handoff writes down what matters before you start fresh. Many of his skills are a habit that corrects one of these.

When you are not sure which one fits, start here:

• /mattpocock-skills:ask-matt: describe your situation and it says which skill or sequence of skills fits. It reads each skill before recommending it.

For thinking and learning:

• /mattpocock-skills:grill-me: Claude interviews you about a plan, one hard question at a time, until the holes are out of it. Good before a big decision, a job change, or a purchase.
• /mattpocock-skills:teach: a course on anything, below.
• /mattpocock-skills:research: looks a question up in high-trust sources and writes the findings, with links, to a Markdown file. Claude starts it on its own when you ask it to research something.
• /mattpocock-skills:wait-what: when Claude's last answer did not make sense, this makes it explain again from a different angle.
• /mattpocock-skills:handoff: writes up the current conversation so a fresh session can pick it up. Use it before /clear when a long task is half done.
• /mattpocock-skills:to-questionnaire: turns a decision you can't make alone into a set of questions for someone else to answer.

For building an app, the main route is grill-with-docs (pin down what you want), then to-spec and to-tickets (turn it into a plan in small steps), then implement for each step. ask-matt explains the whole route and when to take the side roads, such as prototype for a quick throwaway version to try an idea.

Big, foggy projects: wayfinder

Some ideas are too big to plan in one conversation, and you can't yet see how to get from here to done: a whole app, a course to write, a career change with a dozen open questions. /mattpocock-skills:wayfinder is for those. It works out the plan, one decision at a time, and builds nothing until the way is clear.

• It starts by naming the destination: what done looks like, such as "a spec for an app that tracks my job applications".
• It draws a map: one note listing the destination, the decisions made so far, and what is still foggy. Each open question becomes its own ticket, sized to one conversation.
• Each session, you and Claude pick a ticket you can answer now, settle it, and record the decision on the ticket. Answering one question often shows the next ones, and new tickets appear as the fog clears.
• When nothing is left to decide, the map hands off: to-spec turns the decisions into a buildable plan, and the main route above takes it from there.

The tickets live in an issue tracker. Before the first map in a folder, run /mattpocock-skills:setup-matt-pocock-skills there. It asks a few questions; the one that matters here is where tickets live: GitHub Issues, if the folder is a GitHub repo, or Markdown files under .scratch/ in the folder itself. Accept the defaults for the rest. Use /clear between tickets; the map carries everything the next session needs.

Learning anything with teach

teach turns a folder into a course on one subject, built around why you want to learn it. It works for anything: Spanish, investing basics, music theory, SQL, how a car engine works.

Asking Claude questions teaches you something once. Next week it has no idea what you already know, it can't tell you whether the last explanation stuck, and its answers rest on whatever it remembers, right or wrong. teach fixes each of those with a file: a record of what you have learned, a practice task in every lesson, and a list of sources every lesson is built from.

Give each subject its own folder, where you can open the lessons like any web page. Ask Claude in any session:

Make a folder for a Spanish course in my Documents folder and tell me the command to start Claude there.

Or by hand, on a Mac or Linux:

mkdir -p ~/Documents/Learning/spanish
cd ~/Documents/Learning/spanish && claude

On Windows, keep the folder on the Windows drive so File Explorer opens the lessons:

mkdir -p "/mnt/c/Users/<your Windows name>/Documents/Learning/spanish"
cd "/mnt/c/Users/<your Windows name>/Documents/Learning/spanish" && claude

Start Claude in that folder, then type /mattpocock-skills:teach and say what you want to learn. The first session asks why you want it, because every lesson is aimed at that. Over time the folder fills up:

• MISSION.md: why you are learning this.
• RESOURCES.md: the books, sites, and videos it found, so every lesson rests on a source you can check.
• lessons/: short lessons as web pages, each with one thing to practise. Double-click one in File Explorer or Finder, or ask Claude to open it.
• reference/: cheat sheets distilled from the lessons.
• learning-records/: what you have learned so far, so the next lesson starts where you are.

To continue, start Claude in the folder again (ask "what's the command to open my Spanish course?" if you forget it) and type /mattpocock-skills:teach again. Ask questions in the middle of a lesson; Claude is the teacher. To back a subject up, ask Claude to make the folder a private GitHub repo.