Matt Pocock open sourced his dot claud folder.
Just the markdown files he keeps in there. Ninety days later, 68,000
stars.
More than Next. Js got in its first three years.
So what's actually in this folder? And why are real engineers throwing out SpecKit and BMAD to copy it? Here's the whole repo,
folder of folders. Engineering,
productivity,
personal,
misc.
Inside each folder, more folders.
Inside those,
a single file called skill dot m d. That's it. No runtime, no orchestrator, no 12 agent hierarchy.
Just mark down the agent reads on demand. 68,000
stars for a folder of text files. You know the loop. You type a vague request.
Agent guesses.
Agent ships the wrong thing.
You fix the prompt.
Agent guesses harder.
Pocock has a name for this. Vibe coding,
and the whole repo is built to kill it. Skill number one,
slash grill me.
The agent stops being polite.
It interviews you about your plan,
one question at a time,
walks every branch of the decision tree, makes you commit before any code gets written.
Quote from the skill file.
Interview me relentlessly until we reach a shared understanding.
Pocock's most used skill by his own admission.
The fix for misalignment is friction
applied to you. Skill number two solves
verbosity.
Before, there's a problem when a lesson inside a section of a course is made real,
given a spot in the file system.
After, with a shared language file called context dot m d,
there's a problem with the materialization
cascade.
Same bug, same agent, half the tokens.
Pocock calls this the single coolest technique in the repo.
He's not wrong. Skill number three slash
TDD.
Most people let the agent write all the tests first,
then all the code.
Pocock's skill literally says, do not do this.
One test, one implementation,
one green bar,
repeat.
He calls the wrong way, horizontal slicing.
Tests written in bulk verify imagined behavior,
not actual behavior.
Vertical slices,
tracer bullets,
red green refactor,
boring,
old,
works. Skill number four,
slash diagnose.
Six phases.
Reproduce,
minimize,
hypothesize,
instrument,
fix,
regression test.
But the real trick is phase one, building a feedback loop.
Pocock lists 10 ways, ranked,
failing test at the top, driving a human with a bash script at the bottom, last resort.
Quote,
build the right feedback loop, and the bug is 90
fixed.
Compare the field.
SpecKit,
93,000
stars.
GitHub published, has a constitution file.
GSD,
get stuff done, 61,000
stars,
opinionated framework just for Claude code.
BMAD,
46,000
stars,
12 specialized agents doing product, architecture,
UX, dev, QA, scrum master.
Pocock's repo,
just markdown, beats two of them already.
Here's the thesis.
Big frameworks own the process.
They give you 12 agents and a constitution and a methodology.
And when something breaks, you don't know which layer to fix.
Skills do the opposite.
Each one is a single file.
You can read it. You can fork it. You can delete it. No lock in. No magic. No Kool Aid.
The catalog is the artifact.
And here's the part that explains the star count. Pocock didn't just publish files.
He shipped an installer.
One command picks your skills, picks your agent, Claude code, codex, whatever,
wires them in, distribution as a feature.
Most open source projects forget that part. Verdict.
If you're using Claude code, cursor,
or codex,
you're already running this pattern badly.
Steel Pocock's version.
Command on screen.
Repos in the description.
Skills are the new package dot JSON.
Start curating yours
or someone else will. Sub for the next one.