v1.1.0

Minor Changes

• #406 930a450 Thanks @mattpocock! - Bring the ask-matt router up to date with the full skill set. It now maps five skills it was missing: tdd (woven into the main flow as the red-green engine implement drives), diagnosing-bugs (a new "Something's broken" on-ramp — there was previously no route for a bug), domain-modeling and codebase-design (a new "Vocabulary underneath" section), and grilling (the shared interview primitive). prototype is fleshed out as a standalone and the description broadens from "user-invoked skills" to "the skills". A maintenance rule is added to CLAUDE.md so any future skill add/rename/remove or flow change triggers an ask-matt re-check, beside the existing docs-page re-sync rule.

• #464 639df6e Thanks @mattpocock! - Promote and harden code-review. The in-progress review skill is renamed to code-review and moved from in-progress/ into engineering/: it now ships in the plugin, is listed in the top-level and Engineering READMEs (Model-invoked), and has a docs page at docs/engineering/code-review.md. The /implement skill and docs point at /code-review.

  It also gains an always-on Fowler smell baseline on its Standards axis — a curated ~12 high-signal "Bad Smells in Code" (Mysterious Name, Duplicated Code, Feature Envy, Data Clumps, Primitive Obsession, Repeated Switches, Shotgun Surgery, Divergent Change, Speculative Generality, Message Chains, Middle Man, Refused Bequest) inlined into SKILL.md as a fixed baseline alongside whatever the repo documents, not a new third axis. Two binding rules keep it safe: a documented repo standard overrides the baseline, and every smell is reported as a judgement call, never a hard violation.

• #464 639df6e Thanks @mattpocock! - Sharpen grilling on two fronts.

  A confirmation gate. The agent won't enact the plan until you confirm the shared understanding has been reached — turning the skill's existing "shared understanding" completion criterion into an explicit stop-gate. The description also recruits the pretrained grill leading word ("Grill the user relentlessly") to sharpen invocation, and the docs page is re-synced.

  Facts vs. decisions. Grilling now splits facts (look them up — explore the codebase) from decisions (put each one to the human and wait for their answer). The old blanket line — "if a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase instead" — was written for the live-human case, but once another skill runs grilling inside a resolve-the-ticket frame it read as license to answer decisions autonomously too. Separating the two keeps a grilling agent from racing ahead and answering its own questions.

• #463 af6d692 Thanks @mattpocock! - Add two adjacent Steering failure modes to writing-great-skills, both about how language you think of as "off" still steers the agent. Negation — the elephant — is steering by prohibition: naming what not to do drags the forbidden behaviour into context and makes it more available, not less (don't think of an elephant), so the cure is to prompt the positive. Negative Space — the void — is blindness to the steering done by what you leave out: every decision a skill declines is delegated to the agent's priors rather than left neutral, so the cure is to read a draft for its silences and decide each omission deliberately (fill it, or leave it open as a real branch). Kept as two entries, not one — they carry different diagnostics and different cures — each a full GLOSSARY.md entry plus a SKILL.md failure-mode bullet, matching how every other failure mode is carried.

• 850873c Thanks @mattpocock! - Make the prototype skill model-invoked, so the agent can reach for it autonomously (and other skills can too). Its description is rewritten around the leading word prototype — throwaway code that answers a design question — with one trigger per branch (state/logic sanity-check, or UI exploration).

• #409 0d74d01 Thanks @mattpocock! - Add the research skill — a small, model-invoked skill that spins up a background agent to investigate a question against primary sources (official docs, source code, specs, first-party APIs), then leaves a single cited Markdown file wherever the repo keeps such notes. It's delegable reading legwork: you keep working while it reads, and get back a document to grill, plan, or design against. Listed in the top-level and Engineering READMEs (Model-invoked), added to .claude-plugin/plugin.json, given a docs page at docs/engineering/research.md, and routed as a Standalone in ask-matt.

• #469 a0329ba Thanks @mattpocock! - Split the to-issues skill into a lean Process and a Reference section, and teach it to handle a wide refactor — a single mechanical change (like renaming a column) whose blast radius fans across the whole codebase, breaking thousands of call sites at once so no vertical slice can land green. The drafting step now points at two co-located reference blocks: the Vertical slice rules for ordinary tracer bullets, and Wide refactors, which slices the change by expand–contract (expand the new form beside the old, migrate call sites in batches sized by blast radius, then contract the old form away) so CI stays green batch to batch — or, when it can't, only at a final integrate-and-verify issue. The issue body template moves into Reference too.

• #464 386d4ff Thanks @mattpocock! - Unify the planning skills. to-prd is renamed to to-spec — "spec" is now the single through-line term (it still opens with "you may know this document as a PRD" for discoverability). to-plan and to-issues are merged into one to-tickets skill, and to-issues is deleted.

  to-tickets breaks a plan, spec, or conversation into a set of tickets — tracer-bullet vertical slices, each declaring its blocking edges. That one artifact reads two ways depending on the tracker /setup-matt-pocock-skills configured: a local file (tickets.md) writes the edges as text and you work it top-to-bottom by hand; a real tracker writes them as native blocking links, so any ticket whose blockers are done is on the frontier and several agents can run at once. The edges live in the ticket either way — the medium only decides whether anything acts on them in parallel.

  Publishing prefers the tracker's native sub-issues for parent → slice and native blocking edges for Blocked by where the tracker supports them, keeping the ## Parent / ## Blocked by body sections as the fallback. The "What to build" template points at where a /prototype's code lives rather than inlining a snippet from it.

  ask-matt's main flow now routes idea → /to-spec → /to-tickets → /implement, and there are human-facing docs pages at docs/engineering/to-spec.md and docs/engineering/to-tickets.md.

• #464 0557d57 Thanks @mattpocock! - Settle wayfinder's place in the docs as a situational on-ramp, not the new main entry flow — the grill-led idea → ship chain stays the front door (crowning wayfinder as the default spine is a v2-sized move, not a 1.1). The ask-matt router now names wayfinder's concrete triggers — a greenfield project or a huge feature build, too big for one session — and the two grill front doors (grill-me, grill-with-docs) signpost up to wayfinder for the effort that's too big to hold in one session, so the on-ramp is discoverable from where a reader actually starts.

• #464 639df6e Thanks @mattpocock! - Graduate and reframe wayfinder — the skill for planning a huge chunk of work, more than one agent session can hold. It moves out of in-progress/ into engineering/ (plugin entry, top-level + Engineering READMEs under User-invoked, a docs page at docs/engineering/wayfinder.md, and a route in ask-matt), landing as a mature skill. The rename and reframe that got it there:

  • decision-mapping is renamed to wayfinder, invoked as /wayfinder. "Decision map" was jargony and inaccurate — only one ticket type is actually a decision. The reframe charts a route through a foggy problem instead, giving one coherent leading-word frame — fog of war, **f...

v1.0.1

Patch Changes

• d20ee26 Thanks @mattpocock! - Make the teach skill reuse-first. Lessons are now built from reusable components in ./assets/ — stylesheets, quiz widgets, simulators, diagram helpers. Reuse is the default: the agent reads ./assets/ before authoring a lesson, builds from what's there, and extracts anything new and reusable into a component rather than inlining it.

v1.0.0

Major Changes

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Add the ask-matt skill — a user-invoked router that points you at the right skill or flow for your situation.

  Breaking: ask-matt routes over the other user-invoked skills in this repo, so it expects them to be installed.

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Add the shared design skills and rewire existing skills onto them.

  • New codebase-design skill — the deep-module vocabulary (module, interface, depth, seam, adapter) and the principles for putting a lot of behaviour behind a small interface. The language that previously lived in improve-codebase-architecture/LANGUAGE.md now lives here, generalized for reuse across skills.
  • New domain-modeling skill — actively build and sharpen a project's domain model, stress-testing terms against the glossary and keeping CONTEXT.md and ADRs current.
  • improve-codebase-architecture now draws its architecture vocabulary from /codebase-design and its domain model from /domain-modeling.
  • tdd now leans on /codebase-design for interface-design guidance — its inline deep-modules.md / interface-design.md notes were removed in favour of the shared skill.
  • grill-with-docs now builds the domain model inline via /domain-modeling.

  Breaking: these skills now depend on the new codebase-design / domain-modeling skills, so you must install them too.

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Remove the caveman and zoom-out skills.

  • caveman was a duplicate of another skill I was testing and was never meant to be public.
  • zoom-out went unused in practice, so it's been removed from the repo.

  Breaking: both skills have been removed.

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Rename the diagnose skill to diagnosing-bugs.

  Breaking: invoke it as /diagnosing-bugs — the old /diagnose name no longer exists.

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Replace write-a-skill with writing-great-skills.

  • Removed write-a-skill.
  • Added writing-great-skills (plus its GLOSSARY.md) — a reference for writing and editing skills well: the vocabulary and principles that make a skill predictable, hunting no-ops down to the sentence level.
  • Exposed grilling as a model-invoked skill — the reusable interview loop behind grill-me and grill-with-docs.

  Breaking: write-a-skill has been removed; use writing-great-skills instead.

Minor Changes

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Add the resolving-merge-conflicts skill — a loop for resolving an in-progress git merge or rebase conflict. Standalone, with no dependencies on other skills.

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Rename the skill taxonomy from Commands / Skills to User-invoked / Model-invoked across the docs, and add docs/invocation.md defining the split: user-invoked skills are reachable only when you type them and exist to orchestrate; model-invoked skills can also be reached automatically when the task fits. A user-invoked skill may invoke model-invoked skills, but never another user-invoked one.

Patch Changes

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Tighten the review skill: fail-fast ref check, single-sourced rules, and no-op cuts.

mattpocock-skills@1.0.0

Major Changes

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Add the ask-matt skill — a user-invoked router that points you at the right skill or flow for your situation.

  Breaking: ask-matt routes over the other user-invoked skills in this repo, so it expects them to be installed.

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Add the shared design skills and rewire existing skills onto them.

  • New codebase-design skill — the deep-module vocabulary (module, interface, depth, seam, adapter) and the principles for putting a lot of behaviour behind a small interface. The language that previously lived in improve-codebase-architecture/LANGUAGE.md now lives here, generalized for reuse across skills.
  • New domain-modeling skill — actively build and sharpen a project's domain model, stress-testing terms against the glossary and keeping CONTEXT.md and ADRs current.
  • improve-codebase-architecture now draws its architecture vocabulary from /codebase-design and its domain model from /domain-modeling.
  • tdd now leans on /codebase-design for interface-design guidance — its inline deep-modules.md / interface-design.md notes were removed in favour of the shared skill.
  • grill-with-docs now builds the domain model inline via /domain-modeling.

  Breaking: these skills now depend on the new codebase-design / domain-modeling skills, so you must install them too.

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Remove the caveman and zoom-out skills.

  • caveman was a duplicate of another skill I was testing and was never meant to be public.
  • zoom-out went unused in practice, so it's been removed from the repo.

  Breaking: both skills have been removed.

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Rename the diagnose skill to diagnosing-bugs.

  Breaking: invoke it as /diagnosing-bugs — the old /diagnose name no longer exists.

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Replace write-a-skill with writing-great-skills.

  • Removed write-a-skill.
  • Added writing-great-skills (plus its GLOSSARY.md) — a reference for writing and editing skills well: the vocabulary and principles that make a skill predictable, hunting no-ops down to the sentence level.
  • Exposed grilling as a model-invoked skill — the reusable interview loop behind grill-me and grill-with-docs.

  Breaking: write-a-skill has been removed; use writing-great-skills instead.

Minor Changes

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Add the resolving-merge-conflicts skill — a loop for resolving an in-progress git merge or rebase conflict. Standalone, with no dependencies on other skills.

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Rename the skill taxonomy from Commands / Skills to User-invoked / Model-invoked across the docs, and add docs/invocation.md defining the split: user-invoked skills are reachable only when you type them and exist to orchestrate; model-invoked skills can also be reached automatically when the task fits. A user-invoked skill may invoke model-invoked skills, but never another user-invoked one.

Patch Changes

• 47bde84 Thanks @mattpocock! - Tighten the review skill: fail-fast ref check, single-sourced rules, and no-op cuts.