Matt Pocock Engineering Skills — for DeepSeek Harness (DSH)

⚠️ Unofficial community adaptation. This package is an adaptation, not the upstream project. The skill bodies were written by Matt Pocock (mattpocock/skills, MIT, © Matt Pocock) — we did not author them. We only re-arranged them into DSH's skill layout and wrapped them in a DSH bundle plugin. If you find them useful, star the upstream repo. License & attribution: LICENSE.

A DeepSeek Harness bundle plugin that ports Matt Pocock's "Skills for Real Engineers" / Engineering — straight from my .agents directory skill set into native, discoverable DSH skills.

This is a skill-set adaptation, not a fork of the Claude Code plugin harness: the SKILL.md bodies are preserved as-is (same prompts, same process), re-arranged so DSH's one-level skill discovery (<root>/<name>/SKILL.md) finds them.

Contents — 27 skills (18 Engineering + 7 Productivity + 2 experimental)

Engineering (18)

Skill	What it does
ask-matt	Route a request to the right skill/workflow and phase boundaries
code-review	Two-axis review (Standards + Spec) of a diff, HEAD vs a fixed point, via parallel sub-agents
codebase-design	Design-then-implement codebase architecture (DEEPENING.md, DESIGN-IT-TWICE.md)
diagnosing-bugs	Systematic bug diagnosis with a human-in-the-loop template
domain-modeling	Model a domain via ADRs + CONTEXT format
grill-with-docs	Quick documentation-focused Q&A
implement	Focused implementation brief
improve-codebase-architecture	Refactor with an HTML report of findings
prototype	Prototype with LOGIC.md / UI.md companions
research	Research a topic as a structured task
resolving-merge-conflicts	Guided merge-conflict resolution
setup-matt-pocock-skills	Install-time setup: issue-tracker provider, triage labels, domain.md
tdd	Red/green/refactor discipline with mocking.md + tests.md guides
to-spec	Implement exactly to a written spec
to-tickets	Break work into tickets
triage	Triage incoming work against scope (AGENT-BRIEF, OUT-OF-SCOPE)
wayfinder	Navigation/decision skill when you don't know the next step
wizard	Multi-step guided workflow driven by template.sh

Productivity (7)

Skill	What it does
teach	User-invocable only. Teach the user a new skill or concept inside a persistent teaching workspace (MISSION.md, lessons/, learning-records/, reference/). Pick it from the / slash menu or type /teach <topic> — the model cannot self-invoke it.
grill-me	The user gets grilled to sharpen their own plan
grilling	Grill a plan/design with relentless questioning
handoff	Produce a clean handoff summary for another agent or human
to-questionnaire	Turn the conversation into a structured questionnaire
wait-what	The "wait, what?" second look at a claim or plan
writing-for-agents	Write docs/instructions optimized for agents (SKILL-MECHANICS.md)

Experimental (2, from upstream's in-progress beta channel)

Skill	What it does
retro	User-invocable only. Conduct a retrospective on a coding session and suggest improvements to the coding agent's environment for future runs.
implement-spec	User-invocable only. Implement a written spec as a single PR, working its tickets as a task graph with a grab-ready frontier.

Both skills ship from upstream's skills/in-progress/ beta channel — they are experimental and their content may change as upstream iterates.

About teach: it ships with disable-model-invocation: true (upstream design) — the model cannot load it on its own, so it does not appear in the model's skill catalog. It is a user-invocable skill: it shows up in the / slash menu, and the pre-step gesture boundary also recognizes a hand-typed /teach ... token in a message.

Each skill is a single-level skills/<name>/SKILL.md directory with its resources (agents/openai.yaml, scripts/*, reference .md) kept alongside. DSH discovers them exactly like any local skill.

How to invoke each skill

DSH classifies skills by who may load them. This bundle's 27 skills fall into two groups (verified against the real skill-filesystem provider):

Group	Skills	How to use
Model + user (11)	code-review, codebase-design, diagnosing-bugs, domain-modeling, grilling, prototype, research, resolving-merge-conflicts, tdd, wizard, writing-for-agents	The model may load them on its own when a task matches; they also appear in the / slash menu for you to force-invoke.
User only (16)	teach, ask-matt, grill-me, grill-with-docs, handoff, implement, implement-spec, improve-codebase-architecture, retro, setup-matt-pocock-skills, to-questionnaire, to-spec, to-tickets, triage, wait-what, wayfinder	Only you can start them — pick them in the / slash menu, or type /name <args> in the composer. The model will not self-invoke these (several are disable-model-invocation upstream).

Why so many are user-only: upstream marks interactive coaching flows (teach, grill-me, wait-what, to-questionnaire) and work-intake flows (to-spec, to-tickets, triage, wayfinder) as user-gesture-only so the model does not start a multi-session process unprompted. If you want the model to be able to pick one up by itself, copy that skill's SKILL.md and drop the disable-model-invocation: true line.

Productivity skills in detail

The seven productivity skills are workflow helpers around your working style, not coding tasks. They are best invoked from the / menu or by naming the flow in your message.

• /teach <topic> — the flagship. Creates a teaching workspace in the current directory: MISSION.md (why you want to learn), RESOURCES.md (high-trust sources), lessons/*.html (one tightly-scoped lesson each), learning-records/*.md (numbered ADR-style records of what you learned), reference/*.html (printable cheat sheets), NOTES.md (preferences). Teaching is stateful across sessions: the files persist, so the next /teach session continues from your learning records and computes your zone of proximal development.
• /grill-me — the agent interviews you to sharpen your plan before you commit to it. Use when you have a half-formed idea.
• /grilling — the inverse: you (or your spec) get interrogated relentlessly to find holes in a plan or design.
• /handoff — writes a clean handoff summary (state, decisions, next steps) for another agent or a human teammate.
• /to-questionnaire — distills the current conversation into a structured questionnaire (useful for requirements gathering or user research).
• /wait-what — forces a skeptical second look at a claim, estimate, or plan before you accept it.
• /writing-for-agents — guides writing docs/instructions that agents can actually follow; ships SKILL-MECHANICS.md explaining the mechanics.

Typical first-run sequence for a new project

1. Run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once to configure your issue tracker (GitHub/GitLab/local) and triage vocabulary.
2. Use /to-spec or /to-tickets to capture incoming work.
3. Use /triage and /wayfinder to route and plan large chunks of work.
4. Use /code-review, /tdd, /diagnosing-bugs, /resolving-merge-conflicts during implementation.
5. Use /teach, /grill-me, /writing-for-agents for your own learning and documentation.

Install

Requires a DeepSeek Harness install (dsh on PATH or the repo's pnpm dsh).

# from the GitHub release (latest published tarball)
dsh plugin --profile web add https://github.com/xiaoxiaosrm/dsh-mattpocock-skills/releases/download/v0.4.0/mattpocock-community-dsh-engineering-skills-0.4.0.tgz

# or from a local checkout / tarball
dsh plugin --profile web add file:./mattpocock-dsh-engineering

Then restart the profile. Verify the bundle loaded and its skills are visible:

dsh --profile web --dump-config | grep -A5 'skill-filesystem-mattpocock'

The skills appear in the model's catalog alongside your normal local skills — on every DSH surface (web, TUI, headless). User-only skills additionally appear in the / slash menu after the profile restarts and a session (re)opens.

Note on agent resource files. The agents/*.yaml companions are Claude Code interface descriptors and are not interpreted by DSH. They ship only for fidelity to the source set and are inert. Several skills also reference a /setup-matt-pocock-skills slash command and docs/agents/issue-tracker.md that live in the original repository root; run that skill (or provide an issue-tracker) once in your project for the tracking-dependent skills (code-review, triage, to-tickets) to resolve a spec source.

Why a plugin vs. just copying to ~/.dsh/skills/

• Distributes and version-skills from one deliverable across machines/repos.
• Lives under your profile's node_modules, so a dsh plugin remove cleans it.
• A single cordis.patch.yml registers its own dedicated host skill-filesystem instance (skill-filesystem-mattpocock) into DSH's global skill layer — so the set loads in every surface (web, TUI, headless). The bundle does not patch the shared skill-filesystem row: the web profile ships that row disabled ("presets own local discovery"), so appending customSkillDirs to it made the whole set invisible on web. Instead this bundle inserts a distinct instance with providerName: mattpocock and includeDefaultRoots: false, isolating its discovery to exactly this bundle's skills/ directory (mechanism unchanged since v0.3.0).

Note: the npm tarball intentionally ships only the runtime files (skills/, cordis.patch.yml, LICENSE, README.md). The full change history lives in the repository's CHANGELOG.md on GitHub.

License & attribution

MIT. The skill bodies are adapted from mattpocock/skills (MIT, © Matt Pocock). See LICENSE. If you find the originals useful, star the upstream repo; this package is a community distribution adaptation only.