Remote Box Agent
1dab98299c
Five skills (to-spec, wayfinder, to-tickets, triage, code-review) told the agent to call the Skill tool on setup-matt-pocock-skills as a missing-config precondition. It's user-invoked, so per .agents/invocation.md no other skill — user- or model-invoked — can ever reach it that way. PR #878 turned the old soft "/skill"-style prose into a literal "Call the Skill tool with ..." instruction without checking invocation type, which made this fire more reliably in the wrong direction. Reworded all five as instructions to tell the human to run it instead. diagnosing-bugs had the same problem handing its post-mortem off to improve-codebase-architecture, with no human anywhere in that loop to catch the failed call. Removed the hand-off outright rather than softening it, since it rarely fired in practice; Phase 6 is now "Cleanup" only. Added a carve-out to .agents/invocation.md's "Dependencies between them" section — the section PR #878 introduced — so future "call the Skill tool" instructions can't repeat this against a user-invoked target. Fixes #453.
Engineering
Skills I use daily for code work.
User-invoked
Reachable only when you type them (Claude Code: disable-model-invocation: true; Codex: policy.allow_implicit_invocation: false in agents/openai.yaml).
- ask-matt — Ask which skill or flow fits your situation. A router over the user-invoked skills in this repo.
- grill-with-docs — Grilling session that also builds your project's domain model, sharpening terminology and updating
CONTEXT.mdand ADRs inline. - triage — Move issues through a state machine of triage roles.
- improve-codebase-architecture — Scan a codebase for deepening opportunities, present them as a visual HTML report, then grill through whichever one you pick.
- setup-matt-pocock-skills — Configure this repo for the engineering skills (issue tracker, triage labels, domain doc layout). Run once per repo.
- to-spec — Turn the current conversation into a spec and publish it to the issue tracker.
- to-tickets — Break any plan, spec, or conversation into a set of tracer-bullet tickets, each declaring its blocking edges — text in a local file, or native blocking links on a real tracker.
- implement — Build the work described by a spec or set of tickets, driving
/tddat pre-agreed seams and closing out with/code-reviewbefore committing. - wayfinder — Plan a huge chunk of work — more than one agent session can hold — as a shared map of decision tickets on the issue tracker, resolved one at a time until the way to the destination is clear.
Model-invoked
Model- or user-reachable (rich trigger phrasing so the model can reach for them).
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prototype — Build a throwaway prototype to answer a design question: a single shareable HTML file for state/logic, or several toggleable UI variations.
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diagnosing-bugs — Disciplined diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions: build a feedback loop that goes red on this bug → minimise → hypothesise → instrument → fix → regression-test.
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research — Investigate a question against high-trust primary sources and capture the findings as a cited Markdown file in the repo, run as a background agent.
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tdd — Test-driven development with a red-green-refactor loop. Builds features or fixes bugs one vertical slice at a time.
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domain-modeling — Actively build and sharpen a project's domain model — challenge terms, stress-test with scenarios, update
CONTEXT.mdand ADRs inline. -
codebase-design — Shared discipline and vocabulary for designing deep modules: small interfaces, clean seams, testable through the interface.
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code-review — Two-axis review of the diff since a fixed point: Standards (does it follow the repo's coding standards, plus a Fowler smell baseline?) and Spec (does it faithfully implement the originating issue/spec?), run as parallel sub-agents.
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resolving-merge-conflicts — Work through an in-progress git merge or rebase conflict hunk by hunk, resolving by intent traced to each side's primary source, then finish the operation — never
--abort. -
wizard — Generate an interactive bash wizard that walks a human through steps only they can perform: provisioning infrastructure, setting up credentials or CI secrets, walking an unfamiliar third-party dashboard, or running a one-off migration or cutover.