Announcing mattpocock/skills v1
- Achieved a 63% reduction in token cost for skill descriptions
- Split skills into model-invocable and user-invocable skills, adding /codebase-design, /domain-modeling, and /grilling
- (UPDATED) /writing-great-skills - rewritten from the ground up, encoding my skill-writing best practices
- (UPDATED) /diagnose -> /diagnosing-bugs - now model-invocable, awesome for fixing hard bugs
- (NEW) /ask-matt: a router skill that teaches you how all the engineering skills work together
Almost 8 years ago, back in college, had this naive thought
"Wouldn't it be cool if an app could keep track of all my assignments, exams, club events.. pretty much everything, and help me plan my day?"
For context, time estimation and prioritisation have never been my superpowers. So I often find myself in a spiral of planning and replanning. On top of that, I keep forgetting simple tasks
Like placing an order my mom's been asking for a month. Yes, a month. Takes 5 minutes. Still forgot.
Bounced the idea with my roommate, and we looked around but the best we could find was a bunch of TODO lists
Now years later, I revisited the idea, and guess what? Still no solution that JUST worked for me
So I'm building Starlight - an AI assisted day planner that keeps track of everything you need to do, helps plan your day, all while fitting tasks into your existing routine rather than creating a new one.
Still in the early, messy phase, but will keep sharing updates as I go :)
@Boccassini_ai@NanouuSymeon I would disagree. Both are different skills. Being able to comprehend doesn’t mean you can produce at the same level. In order to write code, you have to write code.
Hot take
Vibe coding, agentic engineering, context engineering, harness engineering are all fun, but they just can't replace the satisfaction of writing code manually
Plan + Manual Accept mode is severely underrated. Yes it feels slow, but I’ve been able to catch bugs that could’ve easily propagated to the rest of the flow.
You don't make a good skill by writing a skill.
You make it by doing the thing, fixing it 20 times, then telling the AI to bottle up everything you just did.
@araseb_ The common element across all these is the HUMAN touch. We all crave its presence, and we can all sniff its absence. So I think it’s gonna be a mix at best!
Almost 8 years ago, back in college, had this naive thought
"Wouldn't it be cool if an app could keep track of all my assignments, exams, club events.. pretty much everything, and help me plan my day?"
For context, time estimation and prioritisation have never been my superpowers. So I often find myself in a spiral of planning and replanning. On top of that, I keep forgetting simple tasks
Like placing an order my mom's been asking for a month. Yes, a month. Takes 5 minutes. Still forgot.
Bounced the idea with my roommate, and we looked around but the best we could find was a bunch of TODO lists
Now years later, I revisited the idea, and guess what? Still no solution that JUST worked for me
So I'm building Starlight - an AI assisted day planner that keeps track of everything you need to do, helps plan your day, all while fitting tasks into your existing routine rather than creating a new one.
Still in the early, messy phase, but will keep sharing updates as I go :)
@alexkaybuilds Exactly! Storage has never been the problem, it's prioritisation especially under time constraints and deadlines - deciding what to do and what NOT to do.
Been teaching myself using Claude on my side project lately, and I can’t help but feel that should become the standard of how software dev is thought. Hands on, in a real code base!
Steps to become a senior programmer:
1. Install my /teach skill
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill teach
2. Create a new working directory on your laptop
mkdir junior-to-senior
cd junior-to-senior
3. Kick off your coding agent in the directory
claude
4. Copy this prompt
/teach me how to be a great strategic programmer. My opinion is that AI is eating 'tactical, on-the-ground' programming. The day-to-day work of a developer involves not only coding, but also planning, QA, codebase design, and much more. I'm interested in learning the strategic skills - that, in a previous era, would take me from junior to senior - but in this era are table stakes.
5. Paste it into the coding agent
Below is an example of what the first output will look like. I used Opus 4.8, medium effort.
6. Continue working with the agent until you're a senior