skills/skills/engineering/README.md

Engineering

Skills I use daily for code work.

User-invoked

Reachable only when you type them (disable-model-invocation: true).

• 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.md and 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.
• wayfinder — Plan a huge chunk of work — more than one agent session can hold — as a shared map of investigation 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).

• prototype — Build a throwaway prototype to answer a design question: a runnable terminal app for state/logic, or several toggleable UI variations.

• diagnosing-bugs — Disciplined diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions: reproduce → minimise → hypothesise → instrument → fix → regression-test.

• 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.

• tdd — Test-driven development with a red-green-refactor loop. Builds features or fixes bugs one vertical slice at a time.

• domain-modeling — Actively build and sharpen a project's domain model — challenge terms, stress-test with scenarios, update CONTEXT.md and ADRs inline.

• codebase-design — Shared discipline and vocabulary for designing deep modules: small interfaces, clean seams, testable through the interface.

• 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/PRD?), run as parallel sub-agents.