Setup Matt Pocock's Skills: Prepare Your Repo for AI Agents

Setup Matt Pocock’s Skills is the one-time configuration pass that every other engineering skill in the mattpocock/skills repo (219K stars) quietly depends on. It ranks #9 on the skills.sh all-time leaderboard with 631,300 installs, and its job is boring on purpose: decide where your issues live, what triage labels mean, and where domain docs go — once, up front, so the skills that run later don’t have to guess. I pulled the actual skill folder out of the repo and read every file, because the README undersells what this thing decides for you.

What It Actually Does

Run it once, and it writes the config files that to-tickets, triage, and to-spec read before they touch your repo. The output lands in docs/agents/: an issue-tracker file, a domain-docs file, a triage-labels file (only when the triage skill is installed), plus an ## Agent skills block appended to your CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md.

The skill is prompt-driven, not scripted. It explores your repo first, presents what it found, takes your answers one section at a time, shows you a draft, and only then writes anything.

The Three Decisions It Makes You Make

Section A — where your issues live. You get four options: GitHub (driven by the gh CLI), GitLab (glab), local markdown files under .scratch/<feature>/, or any other tracker you describe in one paragraph of freeform prose. The skill defaults to GitHub when git remote -v points there, and GitLab for GitLab remotes. The choice gets recorded in docs/agents/issue-tracker.md with the exact CLI conventions for creating, reading, and labeling issues. A “PRs as a request surface” flag ships in the GitHub and GitLab templates, defaulted off — the skill won’t even raise it unless you flip it yourself.

Triage labels only get configured when the triage skill is installed. Exploration checks your available skills first and skips Section B entirely otherwise. The defaults are five labels: needs-triage, needs-info, ready-for-agent, ready-for-human, wontfix. Say no to the defaults only when your tracker already uses different names, and the skill records the mapping instead of creating duplicates.

Domain docs default to single-context: one CONTEXT.md plus docs/adr/ at the root, written without asking. Multi-context — a CONTEXT-MAP.md pointing at per-context files — comes up only when exploration finds monorepo signals: a pnpm-workspace.yaml, a workspaces field in package.json, or populated packages/* directories.

The Quirks Worth Knowing

Three details jumped out while I read through the skill folder file by file.

First, the skill refuses to decide which file to edit. If CLAUDE.md exists it edits that; otherwise AGENTS.md; if neither exists it asks you — and it will never create the one that’s missing. That anti-duplication rule is easy to miss because the skill’s own description never mentions it.

The second quirk: it ships disable-model-invocation: true, the same flag as Grill with Docs. The model can’t trigger this skill mid-conversation no matter how relevant the moment looks. You type /setup-matt-pocock-skills explicitly.

Then there’s the quietest detail, buried in the domain.md seed template: downstream skills proceed silently when CONTEXT.md doesn’t exist. No flagging, no nagging to create it — /domain-modeling creates those files lazily, only when a term or decision actually gets resolved. That default is why this skill family doesn’t litter fresh repos with empty scaffolding.

When You Can Skip It

Solo project, no remote, none of the engineering skills installed? Skip the setup. The only consumers are to-tickets, triage, to-spec, grill-with-docs, domain-modeling, and improve-codebase-architecture — none installed, nothing to configure. The skill agrees: it drops Section B on its own when triage isn’t present.

Bottom Line

If you use any of Matt Pocock’s engineering skills, run this once before the first use. The alternative is those skills guessing where your issues live, or writing ADRs into a folder nobody reads. Re-running is only necessary when you switch issue trackers or want a clean restart — the config files are plain markdown you can edit by hand anytime. Install it with npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills and pick it in the installer, or claude plugins install mattpocock-skills for the managed plugin. The skill it most often precedes, Grill with Docs, is the one that turns this domain-doc setup into actual ADRs — and if you want the interrogation without the documentation, Grill Me is the lighter sibling.