Evaluating Skills

Skills are curated instructions and resources used to improve the performance of coding agents like Claude Code in specialized domains. A systematic evaluation pipeline is necessary to ensure these skills are effective. This process involves defining tasks, creating corresponding skills, running the agent with and without the skills, and comparing performance based on clear metrics. Best practices include using clean, isolated testing environments like Docker, making skills modular, and leveraging observability tools like LangSmith to trace agent behavior and understand failures. The results show that agents with skills completed tasks 82% of the time, compared to only 9% without them.