Five engineering skills for a Vellum personal assistant, ported from Matt Pocock's 5 Agent Skills I Use Every Day.
Plans, PRDs, vertical-slice issues, test-driven development, and codebase deepening, installed as one bundle.
Install
# From your vellum-assistant checkout, after the catalog PR merges on main:
assistant plugins install ai-hero-engineer-kit
# Or, before the catalog lands, install straight from the branch:
assistant plugins install ai-hero-engineer-kit --ref catalog/ai-hero-engineer-kit
The runtime picks the five skills up from skills/<name>/SKILL.md and matches them against your conversation via the description and metadata.vellum.activation-hints frontmatter. No daemon hooks required for this kit.
What's in here
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
grill-me | Interview me relentlessly on a plan until we reach shared understanding, walking each branch of the tree. |
to-prd | Turn the current conversation into a PRD with user stories, implementation decisions, and testing decisions. |
to-issues | Break a PRD into vertical-slice GitHub issues using tracer bullets, published in dependency order. |
tdd | Red-green-refactor with agents. One test, one implementation, repeat. Avoid horizontal slices. |
improve-codebase-architecture | Surface shallow modules and propose deepening opportunities. Driven by domain language and ADRs. |
Read them in order. grill-me builds shared understanding, to-prd writes it down, to-issues slices it, tdd ships each slice, and improve-codebase-architecture keeps the codebase hygienic in between.
Layout
ai-hero-engineer-kit/
├── package.json
├── skills/
│ ├── grill-me/SKILL.md
│ ├── to-prd/SKILL.md
│ ├── to-issues/SKILL.md
│ ├── tdd/SKILL.md
│ └── improve-codebase-architecture/SKILL.md
└── (no hooks — pure skill bundle)
This plugin does not ship TypeScript code, so there are no hooks/, src/, or tests/ directories. It is just a skills/ catalog. The package.json exists so the catalog loader can resolve the plugin and the peer dependency on @vellumai/plugin-api is declared.
Notes
Skills are adapted directly from Matt Pocock's skills repo. A few of them cross-reference sibling files in that repo (tests.md, mocking.md, LANGUAGE.md, CONTEXT-FORMAT.md, ADR-FORMAT.md, INTERFACE-DESIGN.md, HTML-REPORT.md). If you want the full experience for any of those skills, fetch the file from upstream.
Two of the skills reference /setup-matt-pocock-skills, which is the CLI scaffold Matt ships separately. That command is not part of this kit — the skills still work without it; the issue tracker vocabulary just needs to be available to the assistant another way (or accepted as a default).
Attribution
- Skills: © Matt Pocock, MIT licensed upstream. Adapted and repackaged under the same terms.
- Plugin packaging: Marina Trajkovska.
- See
LICENSEfor the full text.
License
MIT.