Setup Matt Pocock's Skills
Scaffold the per-repo configuration that the engineering skills assume:
- Issue tracker — where issues live (GitHub by default; local markdown is also supported out of the box)
- Triage labels — the strings used for the five canonical triage roles
- Domain docs — where and ADRs live, and the consumer rules for reading them
This is a prompt-driven skill, not a deterministic script. Explore, present what you found, confirm with the user, then write.
Process
1. Explore
Look at the current repo to understand its starting state. Read whatever exists; don't assume:
- and — is this a GitHub repo? Which one?
- and at the repo root — does either exist? Is there already an section in either?
- and at the repo root
- and any directories
- — does this skill's prior output already exist?
- — sign that a local-markdown issue tracker convention is already in use
- Is the skill installed? (a skill folder alongside this one, or in your available skills.) This decides whether Section B runs at all.
- Monorepo signals — a , a field in , or a populated with its own . Present only in a genuinely large multi-package repo; their absence means single-context, which is almost every repo.
2. Present findings and ask
Summarise what's present and what's missing. Then take the sections in order — one section, one answer, then the next.
Lead each section with the recommended answer so the user can accept it in a word. Give a one-line explainer only when the choice genuinely branches; skip the section entirely when exploration already settled it (Section B when
isn't installed, Section C when there's no monorepo).
Section A — Issue tracker.
Explainer: The "issue tracker" is where issues live for this repo. Skills like
,
,
, and
read from and write to it — they need to know whether to call
, write a markdown file under
, or follow some other workflow you describe. Pick the place you actually track work for this repo.
Default posture: these skills were designed for GitHub. If a
points at GitHub, propose that. If a
points at GitLab (
or a self-hosted host), propose GitLab. Otherwise (or if the user prefers), offer:
- GitHub — issues live in the repo's GitHub Issues (uses the CLI)
- GitLab — issues live in the repo's GitLab Issues (uses the CLI)
- Local markdown — issues live as files under in this repo (good for solo projects or repos without a remote)
- Other (Jira, Linear, etc.) — ask the user to describe the workflow in one paragraph; the skill will record it as freeform prose
Record the choice in
docs/agents/issue-tracker.md
. The GitHub and GitLab templates carry a "PRs as a request surface" flag, defaulted
off — leave it off and don't raise it; a user who wants external PRs in the triage queue can flip the flag in the file later.
Section B — Triage label vocabulary. Skip this section entirely if the
skill isn't installed (exploration told you) — an uninstalled skill needs no labels.
If it is installed, ask exactly one question:
Do you want to keep the default triage labels? (recommended: yes)
The defaults are the five canonical roles, each label string equal to its name:
,
,
,
,
. On
yes, write them as-is. Only if the user says no — usually because their tracker already uses other names (e.g.
for
) — collect the overrides so
applies existing labels instead of creating duplicates.
Section C — Domain docs. Default to
single-context — one
+
at the repo root. This fits almost every repo; write it without asking.
Offer
multi-context — a root
pointing to per-context
files — only when exploration found monorepo signals. Then confirm which layout they want.
3. Confirm and edit
Show the user a draft of:
- The block to add to whichever of / is being edited (see step 4 for selection rules)
- The contents of
docs/agents/issue-tracker.md
docs/agents/triage-labels.md
Let them edit before writing.
4. Write
Pick the file to edit:
- If exists, edit it.
- Else if exists, edit it.
- If neither exists, ask the user which one to create — don't pick for them.
Never create
when
already exists (or vice versa) — always edit the one that's already there.
If an
block already exists in the chosen file, update its contents in-place rather than appending a duplicate. Don't overwrite user edits to the surrounding sections.
The block:
markdown
## Agent skills
### Issue tracker
[one-line summary of where issues are tracked]. See `docs/agents/issue-tracker.md`.
### Triage labels
[one-line summary of the label vocabulary]. See `docs/agents/triage-labels.md`.
### Domain docs
[one-line summary of layout — "single-context" or "multi-context"]. See `docs/agents/domain.md`.
Include the
sub-block, and write
docs/agents/triage-labels.md
, only when
is installed and Section B ran. When it isn't, both are omitted.
Then write the docs files using the seed templates in this skill folder as a starting point:
- issue-tracker-github.md — GitHub issue tracker
- issue-tracker-gitlab.md — GitLab issue tracker
- issue-tracker-local.md — local-markdown issue tracker
- triage-labels.md — label mapping (only if is installed)
- domain.md — domain doc consumer rules + layout
For "other" issue trackers, write
docs/agents/issue-tracker.md
from scratch using the user's description.
5. Done
Tell the user the setup is complete and which engineering skills will now read from these files. Mention they can edit
directly later — re-running this skill is only necessary if they want to switch issue trackers or restart from scratch.