mattpocock/skills is the most-installed personal skills repo in the Claude Code ecosystem. By Matt Pocock's own count: "160K stars, 7.5m downloads... and no tutorial" (Jul 9, 2026). It is also unusually alive: skills get renamed, replaced, and publicly buried in a deprecated/ folder. This is the complete, sourced map as of v1.1 (July 8, 2026): the flow he teaches, every deprecation, and what replaced what. Every claim links to his exact post, changelog, or commit.
What is the intended flow?
Pocock's video tutorial (July 9, 2026) walks five skills and is explicit that the order is the point:
"Watch me walk through the essential skills: /grill-with-docs, /to-spec, /to-tickets, /implement, /code-review. It's the whole flow, end-to-end."
Read it as a pipeline, not a toolbox:
- /grill-with-docs: a relentless one-question-at-a-time interview that sharpens the plan and writes terminology and decisions to docs as it goes. Pocock calls it "the easy entry point" (reply).
- /to-spec: turns the conversation into a spec (a PRD) and publishes it to the issue tracker. No interview, pure synthesis.
- /to-tickets: breaks the spec into tracer-bullet tickets, each declaring which tickets block it.
- /implement: executes the tickets test-first at agreed seams.
- /code-review: judges the diff on two axes: repo standards and conformance to the spec.
One prerequisite makes it portable: run /setup-matt-pocock-skills once per repo. "Works with literally anything you can connect to programmatically, with zero changes to the skills" (GitHub, Jira, Linear, or local files) (Jul 8, Apr 28).
Where does /wayfinder fit?
Above the flow. /wayfinder, the v1.1 headliner, plans work "too big for one agent session" as a shared map of investigation tickets. It plans; it does not build (aihero.dev doc). Pocock's positioning, in his words:
"/grill-with-docs? No I think that will remain the easy entry point. /wayfinder for intermediate/advanced users." (Jul 9)
"You'll find wayfinder intuitive, I promise. It's just a more organized and foolproof grill-me." (Jul 2)
/research and /prototype exist to feed it, "or can be used independently" (v1.1 announcement).
What was deprecated, and what replaced it?
| Deprecated / removed | Replaced by | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| /to-prd | /to-spec | v1.1, Jul 8, 2026 | announcement |
| /to-issues | /to-tickets | v1.1, Jul 8, 2026 | announcement |
| /diagnose | /diagnosing-bugs (rename, now model-invocable) | v1, Jun 17, 2026 | v1 announcement |
| /zoom-out | deleted; ideas live in /improve-codebase-architecture | v1, Jun 17, 2026 | reply |
| /qa | none (deprecated folder) | pre-v1 | repo |
| /design-an-interface | none (deprecated folder) | pre-v1 | repo |
| /request-refactor-plan | none (deprecated folder) | pre-v1 | repo |
| /ubiquitous-language | ground covered by /domain-modeling (added in v1) | pre-v1 | repo, v1 |
The deprecated folder's README is one line: "Skills I no longer use." On the culling philosophy, replying about an unused skill: "Yah I experimented with it, never used it, deprecated it and will remove it" (Jun 21).
A detail from the commit log: during the v1.1 release a sequential /to-plan skill was added at 13:11 UTC and unified away into /to-spec + /to-tickets at 13:18. Seven minutes (commit history).
Why did /to-prd become /to-spec?
Announced six days before v1.1, with an apology:
"/to-prd is changing to /to-spec. /to-issues is changing to /to-tickets. Apologies for the churn, but I've been wanting to make this change for a while and now's the time to do it." (Jul 2)
The reasoning is semantic, from the same thread: "Yep, /to-prd currently produces a spec. Tickets and issues are basically interchangeable" (reply). A skill's name is part of the prompt an agent reads, so the name now matches the artifact the next skill in the chain consumes. The same logic drove v1's split into model-invocable and user-invocable skills and its "63% reduction in token cost for skill descriptions" (v1 announcement).
What explicitly survived?
"/grill-me and /grill-with-docs still around" (Jul 6), and v1.1 shipped "crucial fixes to /grill-me". Install data agrees: grill-me is the repo's flagship at roughly 508k installs, ahead of grill-with-docs (424k) and tdd (400k).
How do you keep up?
- Update: run
npx skills@latest add mattpocock/skills(v1.1 announcement). - Watch the changelog on aihero.dev and his X profile. Every removal so far came with a successor or an explanation.
- His video overview: 5 Claude Code skills I use every single day (YouTube, @mattpocockuk).
- The living version of this map, with install counts and the full SKILL.md for every skill including the deprecated ones: Matt Pocock's skills, mapped on Skillselion.
Disclosure: I build Skillselion, an install-ranked directory of agent skills and MCP servers. Every quote above links to the original post and was verified against it before publishing. Skillselion is not affiliated with Matt Pocock or AI Hero.
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