Is mattpocock/skills safe?
Yes. mattpocock/skills is safe to install. Oathe's behavioral security audit gave the skills skill by mattpocock a trust score of 90/100 with 6 findings, none critical or high.
https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/
Is mattpocock/skills safe to install?
mattpocock/skills is a legitimate, well-documented skill collection from a known TypeScript educator targeting software engineering and productivity workflows for AI coding agents. The clone was clean, connecting only to GitHub; no data exfiltration mechanisms, prompt injection attacks, hidden instructions, or malicious code execution were found. The only notable concerns are documented behaviors inherent to the skills' intended functionality: several skills install dev tooling, the wizard skill generates credential-handling scripts (human-executed), and the research skill has a known multi-agent spawning bug that can cause token overconsumption.
What security issues were found in mattpocock/skills?
Category Scores
Findings (6)
LOW Multiple skills install software packages as intended behavior -8 ▶
setup-pre-commit installs Husky/lint-staged/prettier; setup-ts-deep-modules installs dependency-cruiser; migrate-to-shoehorn installs @total-typescript/shoehorn. These are fully documented and intentional, but users should understand that invoking these skills will modify their project dependencies.
LOW wizard skill generates credential-handling shell scripts -5 ▶
The wizard skill generates bash scripts that interact with .env files and GitHub secrets. While designed for legitimate guided credential setup and explicitly does not auto-execute, users should be aware of what scripts are generated before running them.
LOW research skill has documented multi-agent spawning bug -10 ▶
The research skill's own documentation acknowledges issue #530 where the background sub-agent can re-delegate and spawn additional agents, leading to excessive token consumption (~450k tokens reported in one case). This is a resource/cost issue, not a security attack.
INFO Clean clone with single expected GitHub connection 0 ▶
The git clone operation connected only to GitHub (140.82.121.3:443), consistent with the declared repository URL. No additional outbound connections were observed.
INFO Canary file accesses preceded git clone — attributed to audit infrastructure 0 ▶
Access events for .env, .ssh/id_rsa, .aws/credentials, .npmrc, .docker/config.json, and gcloud credentials were recorded at timestamp 1789093793, approximately 5 seconds before the git clone at 1789093798. This timing is consistent with the audit infrastructure performing its baseline canary enumeration before any skill code ran. All files remain intact.
INFO Skills use transparent agent delegation pattern 0 ▶
Multiple skills compose by instructing 'Call the Skill tool with X' (e.g., grill-me calls grilling, grill-with-docs calls grilling and domain-modeling). This is the intended skill composition mechanism documented in the plugin architecture, not an attempt to chain unauthorized skills.
Should I install mattpocock/skills?
Oathe's verdict for mattpocock/skills is SAFE with a trust score of 90/100. Recommendation: Install.