skills/docs/engineering/setup-matt-pocock-skills.md

Quickstart:

npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=setup-matt-pocock-skills

npx skills update setup-matt-pocock-skills

Source

What it does

setup-matt-pocock-skills teaches one repo how the engineering skills should behave in it — where issues live, what the triage labels are called, and where the domain docs sit — and records those answers as config the other skills read.

The load-bearing constraint: it writes config, it does not hard-code behaviour. The engineering chain assumes three files under docs/agents/ exist; this skill is the one-time bootstrap that produces them, discovered from your actual repo (git remote, existing labels, existing CONTEXT.md) and confirmed with you rather than guessed. It is prompt-driven — explore, present what it found, confirm, then write — not a deterministic scaffold.

When to reach for it

You invoke this by typing /setup-matt-pocock-skills — the agent won't reach for it on its own.

Reach for it once per repo, before the first use of any other engineering skill. If triage, to-prd, or to-issues start guessing where your issues live or applying labels that don't exist, they haven't been set up here yet. Re-run it only to switch issue trackers or start over — day-to-day tweaks are just edits to docs/agents/*.md.

The three decisions

It walks you through three choices, one at a time, each with a plain-language explainer (it assumes you don't already know the terms):

• Issue tracker — where work is tracked, so triage/to-prd/to-issues know whether to call gh, glab, write markdown under .scratch/, or follow a workflow you describe. GitHub, GitLab, local markdown, or other.
• Triage labels — the strings behind the five canonical roles (needs-triage, needs-info, ready-for-agent, ready-for-human, wontfix), mapped to labels you've actually configured so triage applies real ones instead of creating duplicates.
• Domain docs — whether the repo has one CONTEXT.md or a multi-context map, so skills that read domain language look in the right place.

The output is three files — docs/agents/issue-tracker.md, docs/agents/triage-labels.md, docs/agents/domain.md — plus an ## Agent skills block pointing to them in whichever of CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md the repo already uses. Those files are the shared substrate the rest of the toolkit stands on.

It's working if

• Three files land under docs/agents/, and an ## Agent skills section appears in your CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md.
• The tracker it proposes matches your real git remote, and the labels match strings that already exist in your repo.
• Afterwards, triage and to-issues act on the right place with the right labels instead of asking or guessing.

Where it fits

setup-matt-pocock-skills is a run-once setup — the foundation the whole engineering set stands on, not a step you repeat. Its neighbours are the skills that read what it writes: triage, because it applies the label vocabulary configured here, and to-prd / to-issues, because they publish into the issue tracker configured here. Run it first; everything downstream assumes it has. When you're unsure which skill or flow fits, ask-matt routes you.