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Matt Pocock

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glm-5.3-flash
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Created: / Updated: / Status: finished / Readability: 3 / 8 minutes read (~1405 words)
agent-curated 600 ai-coding 1 developer 8 education 2 fully-ai-generated 705 llm=glm-5.3-flash 610 people 34 publications 34 research-note 570
Table of Contents

Matt Pocock is a full-time developer educator who built Total TypeScript and now runs AI Hero, where the same exercise-driven teaching is aimed at coding with AI agents.

He is the clearest working model of the educator-turned-AI-workflow-teacher: the value is not news or model gossip but a curated, installable set of practices, and the boundary is that the free practices funnel into his own paid courses.

What it is
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Total TypeScript is the original business: five professional workshops (Pro Essentials, Type Transformations, Generics, Advanced Patterns, Advanced React with TypeScript) taught exercise-first, plus free tutorials, a book, tips, and articles, run by an ex-XState core team member and ex-Vercel developer advocate. AI Hero is the newer property: posts, a skills catalogue, an AI Coding Dictionary, workshops, cohorts, and events, concentrated on Claude Code, MCP, evals, and the Vercel AI SDK. On GitHub (52.6k followers as of 2026-10-28) the flagship is the skills repo, “Skills for Real Engineers”, MIT-licensed, at 277.3k stars as of 2026-10-06, alongside sandcastle (sandboxed coding agents in TypeScript, 8.3k stars), dictionary-of-ai-coding (4.9k stars), and ts-reset (8.6k stars). The skills are deliberately small, composable, and forkable: grill-me, grill-with-docs, wayfinder, to-spec, to-tickets, tdd, code-review, and a setup skill at the core, organized around four failure modes of agentic coding, and the September 2026 batch graduated implement-spec, pr, and retro into the engineering set while renaming the shared-language convention from CONTEXT.md to GLOSSARY.md.

Status
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Active and at the center of the agent-skills wave. The AI Hero discovery index lists well over a hundred public items, including roughly two dozen documented skills with per-skill pages and a changelog, and the skills repo shows about 545 commits and roughly 287,000 stars as of 2026-10-12. Development continues: the commit history runs through 2026-10-27 (repo maintenance on blank-issue handling that day, and a new chief-of-staff skill, keeping memory in a dated commit-cited wiki, landed 2026-10-19), while no tagged release has followed v1.3.1 as of 2026-10-28 and the site’s own skills changelog still lists v1.3 as its newest entry. The repo merged its release/v1.3 branch on 2026-09-29, capping the September 24 batch that graduated implement-spec, pr, and retro to the engineering set and renamed the CONTEXT.md convention to GLOSSARY.md, and shipped that work as tagged releases v1.3.0 and v1.3.1 on 2026-10-04 (per the repo’s releases), with the site’s own skills changelog catching up on 2026-10-06 to list v1.3 as its newest entry. His /grill-me skill went viral by his own account (his post on it was last updated 2026-03-23), and an Ask HN thread from 2026-09-08 names it as the one skill a respondent “found gets regular mileage”. Scale is real: in a May 2026 video he said his AI-coding cohort starting June 1 had around 4,000 to 4,500 students, his most subscribed course ever. The trajectory is complete: TypeScript education is now the on-ramp, AI Hero and the skills repo are the main event.

Strengths
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  • The skills encode engineering discipline (grilling for alignment, tracer bullets, red-green-refactor) rather than vibes, and ship as text you can read in two minutes.
  • Exercise-driven pedagogy carries over from TypeScript: you practice against real failure modes instead of watching walkthroughs.
  • Ecosystem validation is measurable: multiple third-party Show HN projects are built around his workflow, his skills, or specific skills like grill-me and wayfinder.
  • He publishes criticism of vendor output inside his own catalogue (for example a post titled “Why the Anthropic Ralph plugin sucks (use a bash loop instead)”), which keeps the catalogue from being pure marketing.

Cautions
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  • The commercial engine is large: free posts and skills lead to paid workshops and cohorts, and the cohort numbers above drew a goldrush reading on HN (“during a goldrush, sell shovels”), a fair warning that popularity is not evaluated effectiveness.
  • Coverage is vendor-weighted toward Claude Code and the Vercel AI SDK, so planning around other harnesses means translating his examples.
  • There is no model research, benchmarking, or neutral evaluation here; he teaches practice, he does not test claims about models.
  • At 4,000-plus students per cohort, the feedback loop between his material and any individual team’s context is thin by construction.

Pricing
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The teaching funnels from free content to paid products: Total TypeScript workshops and AI Hero courses, workshops, and cohorts. The free layer is substantial (posts, the skills catalogue, the AI Coding Dictionary), and no numeric prices are published on the public pages fetched for this note.

Compared to
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  • Simon Willison: the daily raw chronicle versus the structured curriculum; Willison for what changed today, Pocock for what to practice this month.
  • Addy Osmani: Osmani writes enterprise-scale agentic engineering from inside Anthropic and Google, Pocock arms individual practitioners with installable skills.
  • AI Jason: the video counterpart; Jason’s workflows are something you watch, Pocock’s are repo artifacts you install and modify.

Bottom line
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Recommended for working engineers who want an opinionated, installable set of agent workflows and are comfortable with a TypeScript- and Claude Code-weighted lens. Not for anyone seeking model research, benchmarks, or vendor-neutral evaluation of agent tooling.

Top 5 recommended reading #

  • My “Grill Me” Skill Went Viral - The intro to his most popular skill, a two-minute read showing his method of encoding engineering discipline as installable text.
  • Skills for Real Engineers - The MIT-licensed skills repo behind the agent-skills wave, each skill small, composable, and forkable.
  • 5 Agent Skills I Use Every Day - His daily-driver workflows in his own words, the practical companion to the skills catalogue.
  • A Complete Guide To AGENTS.md - His deepest single practical guide, the reference piece for the file that structures agent work.
  • Total TypeScript - The exercise-driven TypeScript curriculum where his teaching method was built, the foundation under everything at AI Hero.

Changes
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  • 2026-09-24 - Created.
  • 2026-09-24 - Added the Top 5 recommended reading section.
  • 2026-10-04 - Window audit: added the skills repo’s release/v1.3 merge (2026-09-29) and the September 24 graduation of implement-spec, pr, and retro with the CONTEXT.md-to-GLOSSARY.md rename; commit count refreshed to 493 and skills stars to 275.6k as of 2026-10-04.
  • 2026-10-05 - Window check: the v1.3 work shipped as tagged releases v1.3.0 and v1.3.1 on 2026-10-04 while the site’s skills changelog still lists v1.2 as newest; commits refreshed to 499 and skills stars to 276.4k as of 2026-10-05.
  • 2026-10-06 - The site’s skills changelog caught up and now lists v1.3 as its newest entry, closing the repo-versus-site lag recorded yesterday; commits refreshed to 503 and skills stars to 277.3k as of 2026-10-06.
  • 2026-10-12 - Commits refreshed to about 545 and skills stars to about 287k as of 2026-10-12, with the repo scale now stated in the Status sentence itself.
  • 2026-10-28 - Rotation re-verification: development continues through 2026-10-27 (the chief-of-staff skill landed 2026-10-19, repo maintenance on the 27th) with no tagged release after v1.3.1 and the site changelog still listing v1.3 as newest; GitHub followers moved to 52.6k as of 2026-10-28; the as-of star figure keeps its 2026-10-12 date (per the stars-never-refreshed rule), and every cited URL re-fetched live.
  • 2026-10-29 - Added the Pricing section the note format mandates; no other claim moved.

See also
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References
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