dsh-mattpocock-skills

Install Matt Pocock's skills into DeepSeek Harness (DSH).

How DSH "installs" skills (mental model)

DSH has no skill-plugin install command. Skills are files discovered by the skill-filesystem plugin row that agent presets mount in their agent.cordis.yml. That row scans, in priority order:

Rank	Root	Scope
100	<project>/.dsh/skills	current project
200	<project>/.agents/skills	current project
300	customSkillDirs (preset config)	that preset only
400	~/.dsh/skills	every preset, globally
500	~/.agents/skills	every preset, shared with other harnesses

So "installing skills" = placing skill directories in one of those roots. No DSH restart is needed: the filesystem provider watches its roots and refreshes the model's skill catalog live.

This repo installs into ~/.dsh/skills (rank 400) so the skills are available in every preset — standard, cordis, and the mattpocock-skills preset alike. Lower-rank roots (e.g. a project's own .dsh/skills) still override per name.

Usage

./install.sh                # clone/pull upstream, link skills into ~/.dsh/skills
./install.sh                # run again any time to update (does git pull)
./install.sh --categories "engineering productivity misc"
./install.sh --all          # everything except deprecated/ and in-progress/
./install.sh --copy         # copy instead of symlink (snapshot semantics)
./install.sh --no-pull      # install from the current checkout as-is
./install.sh --uninstall    # remove every skill this script installed
./install.sh --help

What it does:

1. Clones (first run) or git pulls mattpocock/skills into upstream-skills/.
2. Flattens the chosen skills/<category>/<skill> directories into ~/.dsh/skills/<skill> as symlinks into the checkout (DSH discovers one level deep, so upstream's two-level layout can't be pointed at directly).
3. Tracks what it installed in ~/.dsh/skills/.mattpocock-skills.manifest:
   • re-runs remove skills that were deleted upstream or deselected,
   • anything in ~/.dsh/skills that is NOT in the manifest is never touched,
   • a name collision with a non-managed directory is skipped with a warning.

Because entries are symlinks, a plain git -C upstream-skills pull also updates skill bodies; DSH's watcher picks up frontmatter changes live. Run ./install.sh when you want membership changes (new/removed skills) synced.

The ask-user overlay (patches/)

Upstream skills were written for Claude Code and say "ask the user" in chat prose. DSH ships a default plugin (@deepseek-ai/dsh-tool-ask-user) whose model-facing tool, ask_user_question, is the proper channel for those moments. This repo carries a DSH-local overlay that says so inside every skill that can ask:

• patches/ask-user-question/<skill>.patch holds one patch per skill. Each appends a DSH note: asking the user section to a SKILL.md: 15 skills in all (10 engineering, 3 productivity, 2 misc) whose instructions contain a genuine ask-the-user step. Grilling's ❓/➡️ round format included. Rhetorical "ask"s (tdd's "Ask: what's the public interface?") are deliberately untouched.
• install.sh resets the checkout to pristine before git pull, then re-applies every patch under patches/ after it. So upstream releases land first, and the overlay rides on top of the new version. Already-applied patches are detected, which keeps re-runs idempotent. A stale patch is skipped with a warning, never a broken install. One patch per skill caps the blast radius of an upstream change at that one skill.

When a release rewrites the tail of a patched file, that patch goes stale and that skill stays unpatched until you regenerate it: from a pristine checkout, append the overlay section to the file, then rewrite the patch with git -C upstream-skills diff -- skills/<bucket>/<skill>/SKILL.md > patches/ask-user-question/<skill>.patch. (This ran for real on 19 Aug: a 110-file upstream release landed mid-session and every patch went stale at once; the overlay was re-based onto the new tree in minutes.) The overlay is a fork-local adaptation, not upstream content, so upstream's docs-page and router sync rules stay untriggered. Skills link by symlink, so the note is in front of DSH live the moment the patch is applied.

The mattpocock-skills preset

~/.dsh/.agent-presets/mattpocock-skills/ is an agent preset (a bundle of Cordis plugin rows), not a plugin. It used to carry copies of these skills wired through customSkillDirs; that was removed in favor of this global install, since preset-local copies (rank 300) would shadow the live global symlinks (rank 400) and go stale. The preset now just provides the persona and the standard tool/session composition; the skills themselves come from ~/.dsh/skills, exactly as in every other preset.