kontol-dsh-skills

Matt Pocock's Skills for Real Engineers as a distributable plugin for the DeepSeek Harness (DSH).

⚠️ Unofficial port. This package converts the promoted (engineering + productivity) skill set from mattpocock/skills (MIT, © 2026 Matt Pocock) into the DSH skill format. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Matt Pocock.

What you get

26 skills (25 upstream + kontol-workflow, a starter router over the set), split like upstream into model-invoked (auto-advertised in the session catalog) and user-invoked (reachable by typing /name in a user message) — all under the kontol- prefix so they can't collide with (or be confused with) the official skill names, see Naming:

Model-invoked (11) — kontol-code-review, kontol-codebase-design, kontol-diagnosing-bugs, kontol-domain-modeling, kontol-grilling, kontol-prototype, kontol-research, kontol-resolving-merge-conflicts, kontol-tdd, kontol-wizard, kontol-writing-for-agents

User-invoked (15) — kontol-ask-matt, kontol-grill-me, kontol-grill-with-docs, kontol-handoff, kontol-implement, kontol-improve-codebase-architecture, kontol-setup-matt-pocock-skills, kontol-teach, kontol-to-questionnaire, kontol-to-spec, kontol-to-tickets, kontol-triage, kontol-wait-what, kontol-wayfinder, kontol-workflow

Skills register at BUNDLED_SKILL_RANK (600) — the lowest precedence in the DSH skill registry — so any project or user skill with the same name wins over the bundled copy. Upstream's philosophy is "make them your own", and the plugin keeps that.

Installation

1. Install the package into your DSH profile

DSH plugins live in a profile's node_modules. For the web profile:

dsh plugin --profile web add kontol-dsh-skills

(dsh plugin forwards to pnpm in the profile directory. If your profile is named otherwise, substitute it.)

2. Mount the plugin row

Add an entry to the profile's cordis.patch.yml (or the home-level $DSH_HOME/cordis.patch.yml):

# profiles/<name>/cordis.patch.yml  (or ~/.dsh/cordis.patch.yml)
- id: mattpocock-skills
  name: 'kontol-dsh-skills'

Restart DSH. The 11 model-invoked skills appear in the session skill catalog; the 14 user-invoked skills are reachable with /kontol-grill-me, /kontol-tdd, etc.

Alternative: install as plain skill files (no plugin)

If you'd rather have editable files than a managed bundle, copy the skill directories anywhere DSH scans skills — a project .dsh/skills or ~/.dsh/skills:

mkdir -p ~/.dsh/skills && cp -r assets/skills/* ~/.dsh/skills/

Both routes coexist; the filesystem copy outranks the bundled plugin.

Naming: kontol- prefix

To keep the bundled skills clearly distinct from the official Matt Pocock set (and from any project/user skills that keep the original names), the build materializes every skill under the kontol- prefix:

• directories are renamed assets/skills/tdd/ → assets/skills/kontol-tdd/,
• the name: frontmatter field is patched to match,
• cross-skill references inside bodies are rewritten (/tdd → /kontol-tdd, "the code-review skill" → "the kontol-code-review skill").

The prefix is configurable and the build is idempotent (already-prefixed skills are skipped, so re-running never double-prefixes):

npm run build                          # default prefix: kontol-
node scripts/build.mjs --prefix=my-    # any kebab prefix (ends with "-")
node scripts/build.mjs --prefix=       # empty prefix keeps original names

On Windows PowerShell, pass a different prefix via the environment instead:

$env:DSH_SKILL_PREFIX = "my-"; npm run build

npm run sync:upstream refreshes assets from upstream first and then rebuilds, so the shipped state is always the prefixed set — nothing drifts.

Keeping in sync with upstream

Nothing updates automatically while the repo lives only on disk — sync is manual. Once the repo is on GitHub, change detection runs on a schedule. There are three layers:

| Command / trigger | What it does | |---|---| | npm run check:upstream | Fast check (one git ls-remote, no clone) against the pinned SHA in .upstream-sha. Exit: 0 = up to date, 1 = update available, 2 = no pin yet (run a sync once). | | npm run sync:upstream | Re-clones mattpocock/skills, refreshes assets/skills, re-applies the prefix, rebuilds the manifest, and re-pins .upstream-sha to the exact commit synced. | | GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/sync-upstream.yml) | Daily cron (and manual Actions → Run workflow): runs the sync; if anything changed, bumps the patch version and opens a PR — you review the skill-content diff and merge. No changes → no PR. |

So after pushing to GitHub you get a PR the day upstream moves, without touching anything. Locally, npm run check:upstream gives the same verdict in a second. For a Windows-native schedule without GitHub, Task Scheduler running node scripts/check-upstream.mjs on a timer works the same way.

Development

npm install            # installs peer deps for local dev
npm test               # smoke-test the provider contract without booting DSH
npm run build          # regenerate lib/manifest.js from assets/skills frontmatter
npm run check:upstream # has upstream moved? fast, no clone (0=current, 1=update, 2=no pin yet)
npm run sync:upstream  # re-clone mattpocock/skills, refresh assets/, rebuild manifest, re-pin

How it works

• assets/skills/<name>/SKILL.md — the shipped skill bodies, materialized under the kontol- prefix (upstream files, minus agents/openai.yaml Claude metadata). Referenced resources (tests.md, template.sh, …) ride along, and resourceBase points at each skill's directory so relative links resolve.
• lib/manifest.js — generated metadata (name, description, invocation policy) extracted from each SKILL.md frontmatter.
• lib/index.js — a Cordis plugin (name, inject: ['skills'], apply) that registers one bundled provider on ctx.skills, mirroring the shipped @deepseek-ai/dsh-skill-badge pattern.

License

MIT. Skill content © 2026 Matt Pocock — see LICENSE. This port adds no new restrictions; the original attribution and license notice are preserved in every copied file's home repo.

Versioning note

DSH is pre-1.0 (0.1.0-rc). Peer dependencies pin the -rc range the plugin was built against; re-run npm test after upgrading DSH and bump this package accordingly.