skills/mattpocock/skills/setup-matt-pocock-skills

setup-matt-pocock-skills

Installation
SKILL.md

Setup Matt Pocock's Skills

Scaffold the per-repo configuration that the engineering skills assume:

  • Backlog — where issues/tickets live (GitHub by default; local markdown is also supported out of the box)
  • Triage labels — the strings used for the five canonical triage roles
  • Domain docs — where CONTEXT.md and ADRs live, and the consumer rules for reading them

This is a prompt-driven skill, not a deterministic script. Explore, present what you found, confirm with the user, then write.

Process

1. Explore

Look at the current repo to understand its starting state. Read whatever exists; don't assume:

  • git remote -v and .git/config — is this a GitHub repo? Which one?
  • AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md at the repo root — does either exist? Is there already an ## Agent skills section in either?
  • CONTEXT.md and CONTEXT-MAP.md at the repo root
  • docs/adr/ and any src/*/docs/adr/ directories
  • docs/agents/ — does this skill's prior output already exist?
  • .scratch/ — sign that a local-markdown backlog convention is already in use

2. Present findings and ask

Summarise what's present and what's missing. Then walk the user through the three decisions one at a time — present a section, get the user's answer, then move to the next. Don't dump all three at once.

Assume the user does not know what these terms mean. Each section starts with a short explainer (what it is, why these skills need it, what changes if they pick differently). Then show the choices and the default.

Section A — Backlog backend.

Explainer: "Backlog" is where issues/tickets live for this repo. Skills like to-issues, triage, to-prd, and qa read from and write to it — they need to know whether to call gh issue create, write a markdown file under .scratch/, or follow some other workflow you describe. Pick the place you actually track work for this repo.

Default posture: these skills were designed for GitHub. If a git remote points at GitHub, propose that. Otherwise (or if the user prefers), offer:

  • GitHub — issues live in the repo's GitHub Issues
  • Local markdown — issues live as files under .scratch/<feature>/ in this repo (good for solo projects or repos without a GitHub remote)
  • Other (Jira, Linear, etc.) — ask the user to describe the workflow in one paragraph; the skill will record it as freeform prose

Section B — Triage label vocabulary.

Explainer: When the triage skill processes an incoming issue, it moves it through a state machine — needs evaluation, waiting on reporter, ready for an AFK agent to pick up, ready for a human, or won't fix. To do that, it needs to apply labels (or the equivalent in your backlog) that match strings you've actually configured. If your repo already uses different label names (e.g. bug:triage instead of needs-triage), map them here so the skill applies the right ones instead of creating duplicates.

The five canonical roles:

  • needs-triage — maintainer needs to evaluate
  • needs-info — waiting on reporter
  • ready-for-agent — fully specified, AFK-ready (an agent can pick it up with no human context)
  • ready-for-human — needs human implementation
  • wontfix — will not be actioned

Default: each role's string equals its name. Ask the user if they want to override any. If their backlog has no existing labels, the defaults are fine.

Section C — Domain docs.

Explainer: Some skills (improve-codebase-architecture, diagnose, tdd) read a CONTEXT.md file to learn the project's domain language, and docs/adr/ for past architectural decisions. They need to know whether the repo has one global context or multiple (e.g. a monorepo with separate frontend/backend contexts) so they look in the right place.

Confirm the layout:

  • Single-context — one CONTEXT.md + docs/adr/ at the repo root. Most repos are this.
  • Multi-contextCONTEXT-MAP.md at the root pointing to per-context CONTEXT.md files (typically a monorepo).

3. Confirm and edit

Show the user a draft of:

  • The ## Agent skills block to add to whichever of CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md is being edited (see step 4 for selection rules)
  • The contents of docs/agents/backlog.md, docs/agents/triage-labels.md, docs/agents/domain.md

Let them edit before writing.

4. Write

Pick the file to edit:

  • If CLAUDE.md exists, edit it.
  • Else if AGENTS.md exists, edit it.
  • If neither exists, ask the user which one to create — don't pick for them.

Never create AGENTS.md when CLAUDE.md already exists (or vice versa) — always edit the one that's already there.

If an ## Agent skills block already exists in the chosen file, update its contents in-place rather than appending a duplicate. Don't overwrite user edits to the surrounding sections.

The block:

## Agent skills

### Backlog

[one-line summary of where the backlog lives]. See `docs/agents/backlog.md`.

### Triage labels

[one-line summary of the label vocabulary]. See `docs/agents/triage-labels.md`.

### Domain docs

[one-line summary of layout — "single-context" or "multi-context"]. See `docs/agents/domain.md`.

Then write the three docs files using the seed templates in this skill folder as a starting point:

For "other" backlog backends, write docs/agents/backlog.md from scratch using the user's description.

5. Done

Tell the user the setup is complete and which engineering skills will now read from these files. Mention they can edit docs/agents/*.md directly later — re-running this skill is only necessary if they want to switch backlog backends or restart from scratch.

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