Grill Me Skill: Matt Pocock's Skills for Claude Code, Ranked

Mert DüzgünPublished November 15, 20267 minute read

grill-me is the most installed of Matt Pocock's skills for Claude Code, with about 1.5 million skills.sh installs (as of November 13, 2026). We list 61 skills from his mattpocock/skills repo on CCM, and this post goes through the ones worth installing.

Matt Pocock describes himself on GitHub as a TypeScript wizard who builds Total TypeScript, a TypeScript course, and lists Vercel and Stately as past employers. The repo README calls the collection "Skills For Real Engineers" and says the skills are meant to be "small, easy to adapt, and composable." The repo had about 320,000 GitHub stars as of November 13, 2026.

What the grill me skill does

You describe a plan, a design or a decision, and Claude interviews you about it until every open decision has an answer.

The grill-me SKILL.md is one line long: it tells Claude to load another skill called grilling. The interview itself lives in grilling.

Claude maps your plan as a "design tree", where each decision branches into the ones that depend on it. It asks in rounds: every question it can ask now without guessing, numbered, each with its recommended answer, worded so "yes" accepts it. If a question needs a fact from the code or the file system, it sends a sub-agent to look it up. It asks you only for decisions.

The session ends when no open branches are left, and Claude does not act until you confirm you agree.

The grill-me skill has disable-model-invocation: true in its frontmatter, so Claude never starts it on its own. You type /grill-me when you want it. The README gives the reason: the most common failure in software development is misalignment, and it is the same with coding agents. A grilling session closes that gap before any code gets written. Matt calls grill-me and grill-with-docs his most popular skills and suggests using them every time you want to make a change.

The grilling docs page in the repo adds two notes. If you prefer one question at a time, add this line to your global CLAUDE.md:

When grilling, ask one question at a time.

And there is no cap on the number of questions on purpose: if a session runs too long, the docs say the scope is usually too big, so split the work and grill the pieces.

How to install grill me in Claude Code

Because grill-me only calls grilling, you need both, and the grilling docs page says the same. Our skill pages show these commands, which install each skill into your project.

In your terminal, install grill-me:

npx -y skills add mattpocock/skills --skill grill-me --agent claude-code

In your terminal, install grilling:

npx -y skills add mattpocock/skills --skill grilling --agent claude-code

Start Claude Code. Inside Claude Code, type this, then your plan on the same line:
```
/grill-me
```

The other route is the plugin. The whole collection is listed in Anthropic's official plugin marketplace as mattpocock-skills, which gives you every skill at once.

Inside Claude Code, type:

/plugin install mattpocock-skills@claude-plugins-official

The README says a plugin updates itself, while skills.sh copies editable files into your project that you update by hand. It also says to pick one route per agent, because installing both gives you every skill twice.

If you want the engineering skills, set up each repo once.

If you use skills.sh, install setup-matt-pocock-skills first. In your terminal:

npx -y skills add mattpocock/skills --skill setup-matt-pocock-skills --agent claude-code

Inside Claude Code, in the repo, type:
```
/setup-matt-pocock-skills
```

The setup skill asks which issue tracker you use (GitHub by default, also GitLab, local markdown or a tracker you describe), your triage labels if triage is installed, and sets where your glossary and ADRs live. Skills like code-review expect it to have run.

The grilling family

CCM lists four skills with grill in the name.

grilling is the interview itself. It is the only one Claude can start on its own when a task fits, and other skills in the repo (triage, wayfinder, improve-codebase-architecture) call it when they need to interview you.

grill-me is the version you type.

grill-with-docs runs the same interview and also loads the domain-modeling skill. As decisions settle, it writes terms to a GLOSSARY.md and records hard-to-explain decisions as ADRs (architecture decision records). The README says a shared glossary lets the agent use one word where it would otherwise use twenty, and the ask-matt router calls grill-with-docs the better choice whenever you have a repo to keep that record in. Install domain-modeling along with it.

batch-grill-me is still listed on CCM, but the repo docs say it is gone: round-based questions shipped briefly as a separate skill and then moved into grilling.

Other Matt Pocock skills worth knowing

Past the grilling family, these are the skills we would look at next, and what their SKILL.md files say they do.

improve-codebase-architecture looks for what Matt calls "deepening opportunities": places where a shallow module could become a deep one, with more behavior behind a smaller interface. It checks recent git history for the files that change most, sends a sub-agent through the code, and writes an HTML report to your temp folder with before and after diagrams for each candidate. When you pick one, it starts a grilling session about it. The README suggests running it every few days and says it finds candidates but will not clean up an old codebase for you.

For test-first work, tdd runs a red then green loop: one failing test, then just enough code to pass it, one slice at a time. Before any test, Claude has to agree with you on the seams (the public interfaces) it will test at. The skill lists anti-patterns such as tests that mock internals and tests whose assertion recomputes the answer the same way the code does.

For hard bugs and performance regressions, use diagnosing-bugs. Its first and longest phase is building a pass or fail signal that fails on this exact bug, with ten ways to build one, from a failing test to a git bisect run script. It also tells Claude to redact secrets in any output it shows you.

When a task outgrows one session, handoff writes a summary of the conversation to your temp folder so a fresh session can pick up the work. It links to existing specs, commits and issues instead of copying them, and removes keys and passwords.

Before you merge, code-review checks the diff since a commit or branch you name on two axes in parallel sub-agents: Standards (your repo's documented rules plus a fixed set of code smells from Martin Fowler's Refactoring) and Spec (does the code match the issue it came from).

Top 10 Matt Pocock skills by installs

Numbers as of November 13, 2026. skills.sh installs are the count skills.sh reports. CCM install copies are the times someone copied our install command for that skill on CCM in the last 30 days.

Skill	What it does	skills.sh installs	CCM install copies (30 days)
grill-me	Interview about your plan, typed by you	1,523,887	1,068
grill-with-docs	Same interview, writes glossary and ADRs	1,305,557	114
improve-codebase-architecture	HTML report of refactor candidates	1,247,666	96
tdd	Red then green test loop	1,220,751	43
setup-matt-pocock-skills	One-time repo setup	1,129,220	10
handoff	Summary for the next session	1,118,238	107
grilling	The interview the others call	1,080,634	70
prototype	Throwaway prototype for a design question	1,060,553	2
triage	Moves issues through triage states	1,058,543	1
domain-modeling	Keeps glossary and ADRs current	958,725	15

The two columns measure different things. On skills.sh, these ten skills sit between about 960,000 and 1.5 million installs. Our CCM copies are per skill on our own pages, so they show what people pick one at a time on CCM. There grill-me leads by a wide margin: 1,068 copies in the last 30 days, against 114 for grill-with-docs in second place. prototype and triage have high skills.sh numbers but almost nobody copies them on their own here.

Where to start

Start with grill-me and grilling. grill-me is the most copied of Matt's skills on CCM by far, and it does nothing without grilling. They need no setup, and the README says grill-me is for non-code uses too.

If you work in one repo every day, switch to grill-with-docs (with domain-modeling) so the answers end up in a glossary and ADRs you keep. Add handoff next for long tasks. Once those are part of how you work, run setup-matt-pocock-skills and try improve-codebase-architecture, tdd and code-review.

If you would rather not pick, install the plugin and you get all of them with updates. All 61 skills from the repo are on our skills page.