Pocock's Agent Skills Repo Passes 284,000 Stars, and Its 1.3.0 Rename Needs a Manual git mv

Matt Pocock's skills repository for coding agents had 284,525 GitHub stars on Oct. 11, a repository created on Feb. 3, and the most useful fact about it is buried in a changelog: its 1.3.0 release on Oct. 4 renamed a file convention, and anyone who installed earlier has to rename their own file by hand.

That is the shape of the project. It is a very popular set of instructions that its author changes often, which makes the install route matter more than the star count.

What 284,525 stars are attached to

Pocock, whose README links to his aihero.dev site and a newsletter it puts at "~60,000 other devs", describes the repository as "My agent skills that I use every day to do real engineering - not vibe coding." A skill here is a folder with a SKILL.md file that tells an agent such as Claude Code or Codex how to run one kind of task: grill the user with questions before coding, write a failing test first, triage tickets.

The GitHub API shows 23,813 forks, 164 open issues and a last push at 10:57 UTC on Oct. 9. The repository is MIT-licensed. The newest commit visible there credits Claude Opus 5.5 as a co-author, so an agent contributed to the instructions that steer agents.

The star count is 4.7 times the newsletter figure the README itself gives, and stars are not installs. The installs live somewhere else.

What the install counters say

The skills.sh page lists 55 skills and 27.3 million total installs. Each skill is counted separately, so one person adding the whole collection raises the total many times over.

1. grill-me1300 thousand
2. grill-with-docs1100 thousand
3. improve-codebase-architecture1100 thousand
4. tdd1100 thousand
5. setup-matt-pocock-skills977.7 thousand
6. handoff958 thousand

Source: skills.sh/mattpocock/skills, accessed 2026-10-11; the page rounds the larger figures

Anthropic's own plugin listing tells a smaller story. Its page for the plugin shows 1,745 installs, describes 21 skills, and carries no Anthropic-verified badge, though other plugins on the same page do. Those two figures count different things through different channels, and neither page explains its method.

How the 1.3.0 rename works

The changelog for version 1.3.0 says the domain-doc convention moved from CONTEXT.md and CONTEXT-MAP.md to GLOSSARY.md and GLOSSARY-MAP.md across eleven skills, including domain-modeling, grill-with-docs and tdd. Its instruction to existing users is blunt: git mv the old file to the new name, because "the skills only look for GLOSSARY.md/GLOSSARY-MAP.md going forward."

The changelog describes no warning for a user who skips that step. By its wording the skills simply look for the new name only. The README's own worked example still links a file called CONTEXT.md, with a note that the name predates the rename.

The same release deleted the resolving-merge-conflicts skill, saying "nothing replaces it". Skills.sh still lists it at 550.9 thousand installs. A patch in the same release is stranger: unquoted colons in six skills' front matter made them invalid YAML, "so skills.sh skipped all six during discovery and they couldn't be listed or installed via npx skills."

Self-updating or hand-updated

The README is candid that the install methods behave differently.

Agent	Command family	Update behaviour
Claude Code	claude plugin install	"Updates itself by default"
Codex	codex plugin add	Updates at startup
GitHub Copilot	copilot plugin install	autoUpdate set in settings.json; daily in VS Code
Gemini CLI, others	gemini skills install, npx skills add	By hand

The README warns that installing through both a plugin and skills.sh "gives you every skill twice". It also means a Claude Code user on the default route receives each of Pocock's changes without reading it. Skills are instructions the agent follows with the user's permissions, so a change to one alters what the agent does next.

Nothing in the repository suggests bad intent. The point is that a rename like 1.3.0 reaches a self-updating install the moment it ships, while the matching git mv is waiting in the user's own repository.

A repo that is closed to new skills

SCOPE.md says contributions of new skills are closed. An issue stays open only if it describes "something that went wrong in a real session", and "Reactions and +1 comments do not count." Issues that need more information are closed after 14 days without a reply.

That policy explains how 164 open issues coexist with 284,525 stars. It also sets a ceiling on what stars can buy a user: a feature request needs an observed failure, and a behaviour that composes from existing skills does not get a new one.

Pocock's README argues against frameworks such as GSD, BMAD and Spec-Kit because they "take away your control". It is less specific about what happens to control when the instructions update themselves. Compare Anthropic's knowledge-work plugins, whose contribution guide this site found overridden by its own CI, and Diagram Design, whose README points Git users elsewhere. In all three the repository's rules matter as much as its stars.

The next check is Pocock's own: the README says the newsletter announces changes, and the 1.3.x line was two releases in one minute on Oct. 4.