Matt Pocock's 39 Agent Skills Make Your AI Grill You Before It Writes Code
Matt Pocock, creator of Total TypeScript, publishes 39 MIT-licensed agent skills that make the AI interview you before it builds. They turn the answers into specs, tickets, tests and code. All 39 are installable from Cuttlefish.MD, HackerNoon's license-checked skills marketplace, and from Matt's own repo.
They follow the open Agent Skills standard, so they run in Claude Code, Codex CLI and 30+ other tools. Each is indexed in HackerNoon's SKILL.md Library. Some live in his repo's in-progress folder, so expect them to change.
Plan and interview: 14 skills
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
| Tells you which skill or flow fits your situation | |
| Shared vocabulary for designing deep modules and their interfaces | |
| Builds and sharpens a project's domain model and GLOSSARY.md | |
| A relentless interview that sharpens a plan or design | |
| Grills you and writes ADRs and a glossary as it goes | |
| Grills you about a plan, decision or idea | |
| Grills you on specs for the workflows you want to build | |
| Builds a throwaway prototype to answer a design question | |
| Investigates a question against primary sources and saves the findings in the repo | |
| Shared language for designing a software factory and its services | |
| Turns a decision you can't answer into a questionnaire for someone else | |
| Turns the conversation into a spec on your issue tracker | |
| Breaks a plan into tracer-bullet tickets with their blocking dependencies | |
| Plans work too big for one session as a map of decision tickets |
Build, review and hand off: 14 skills
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
| Pursues a long-running goal in one session by coordinating subagents | |
| Hands the conversation to a fresh background agent that picks up the work | |
| Reviews changes since a commit, branch or tag for standards and correctness | |
| A diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions | |
| Compacts the conversation into a handoff document for another agent | |
| Implements work from a spec or set of tickets | |
| Implements the output of to-spec and to-tickets | |
| Finds deepening opportunities and presents them as a visual HTML report | |
| Writes a PR description | |
| Runs a retrospective on a coding session | |
| Builds features and fixes bugs test-first, red-green-refactor | |
| Moves issues and outside PRs through triage: categorize, verify, respond | |
| Makes the agent stop and check before it carries on | |
| Generates a bash wizard that walks a human through steps only they can do |
Repo setup and TypeScript: 5 skills
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
| Sets up Claude Code hooks that block push, reset --hard and other dangerous git commands | |
| Migrates test files from | |
| Sets up a repo's issue tracker, triage labels and domain docs for these skills | |
| Adds Husky pre-commit hooks with Prettier, type checks and tests | |
| Wires dependency-cruiser in so each TypeScript package stays a deep module |
Writing and teaching: 6 skills
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
| Creates exercise folders with problems, solutions and explainers that pass linting | |
| Teaches you a new skill or concept inside your workspace | |
| Assembles material into beats, defining each term before a beat leans on it | |
| Writes skills, AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files that agents follow | |
| Mines raw fragments and ideas before any structure exists | |
| Shapes raw material into an article, paragraph by paragraph |
Install them
Cuttlefish sorts skills by what they do, so Matt's 39 are spread across five category plugins. Most of them (29) are in Dev Workflow:
/plugin marketplace add hackernoon/cuttlefish-agent-skills /plugin install dev-workflow@cuttlefish /plugin install writing-blogging@cuttlefish /plugin install learn-tech@cuttlefish The remaining two are tdd in QA & Testing and codebase-design in Design & UI. For every Matt Pocock skill and nothing else, install straight from his repo. For Codex CLI or Cursor, copy the folders into your agent's skills directory, such as .agents/skills/.
Each skill keeps its MIT license and an ATTRIBUTION.md naming the source commit. Browse the full library at hackernoon.com/skills, and star Cuttlefish.MD on GitHub.