/skill-tester

name: skill-tester
description: "Validates all interactive skills in this repo against the Agent Skills spec, project conventions, and structural requirements. Runs quick_validate.py, checks line limits, verifies cross-references, and tests hook scripts. Use when skills have been added or modified and you want to verify everything passes before committing or submitting."

Skill Tester

Validates all interactive (non-CI) skills in this repo. Runs the Anthropic skill-creator's `quick_validate.py` plus project-specific checks.

When to Use

• After adding or modifying a skill
• Before committing changes
• Before submitting the plugin for Anthropic review
• As part of the outer loop when eval-creator needs to verify skill quality

Checks

1. Anthropic Spec Validation

Run `quick_validate.py` on every skill in `skills/` (excluding `-ci` variants):

for d in skills/*/; do
  skill=$(basename "$d")
  [[ "$skill" == *-ci ]] && continue
  python3 .claude/skills/skill-creator/scripts/quick_validate.py "$d"
done

**Pass criteria:** Exit code 0 for every skill. Frontmatter has only allowed keys (`name`, `description`, `license`, `allowed-tools`, `metadata`, `compatibility`). Name is kebab-case, max 64 chars. Description max 1024 chars, no angle brackets.

2. Project Convention Checks

For each skill directory:

| Check | Rule | Severity | |-------|------|----------| | Name matches folder | Frontmatter `name` == directory name | Error | | Line limit | SKILL.md at or under 600 lines | Error | | No README.md | Skill folders must not contain README.md | Error | | Scripts executable | All `.sh` files in `scripts/` must have execute permission | Error | | References exist | Files referenced in SKILL.md body actually exist in `references/` (agent-performed — not covered by run-tests.sh) | Warning | | Description non-empty | Description field is present and non-empty | Error |

3. Instruction File Validation

Validate this finite instruction-file set:

• `CLAUDE.md`
• `AGENTS.md`
• `.github/copilot-instructions.md`

`AGENTS.md` and `CLAUDE.md` must be byte-identical. The Copilot file may use provider-specific framing but must retain the same durable principles.

Do not require instruction files to enumerate every skill. Those inventories go stale and contradict this repository's instruction-file conventions. Validate only deliberate skill references in workflow prose: when a named skill is referenced, its canonical directory must exist. The public catalog in `README.md` is maintained and validated separately from agent instructions.

4. Hook Script Testing

For each skill with a `scripts/` directory:

# Syntax check
bash -n scripts/*.sh

# Verify bash shebang (either form used in this repo)
head -1 scripts/*.sh | grep -qE "^#!(/bin/bash|/usr/bin/env bash)"

# Verify executable
test -x scripts/*.sh

5. Plugin Skill Validation (agent-performed — not covered by run-tests.sh)

For skills that exist in both `skills/` and `plugin/skills/`:

| Check | Rule | |-------|------| | Plugin frontmatter keys | Only Claude Code-specific keys (`hooks`, `user-invocable`, `argument-hint`) added beyond spec | | Content alignment | Body content matches or plugin has extracted references | | Beta markers consistent | If `skills/` copy has `[Beta]`, plugin copy should too |

6. Portable Agent Plugins Validation (agent-performed — not covered by run-tests.sh)

After regenerating with `./scripts/sync-plugin.sh`, run:

python3 scripts/test-sync-plugin.py
uv run --with jsonschema==4.25.1 --with PyYAML==6.0.3 \
  python3 scripts/validate-agent-plugin.py

This validates the portable manifest against the vendored official Agent Plugins 1.0.0 schema, checks curated skill membership, rejects non-portable frontmatter, verifies canonical bytes and executable modes, and enforces release-version alignment. Use the Agent Skills reference CLI for an independent format check of generated `agent-plugin/skills/*`.

Output Format

## Skill Test Results

**Date:** YYYY-MM-DD
**Skills tested:** N
**Passed:** N
**Warnings:** N
**Failed:** N
**Instruction files:** passed|failed

### Failures
- [skill-name]: [check]: [error message]

### Warnings
- [skill-name]: [check]: [warning message]

### Passed
- [list of clean skills]

Running

Invoke manually:

/skill-tester

Or run the script directly:

bash skills/skill-tester/scripts/run-tests.sh

Coverage note: `run-tests.sh` automates Checks 1-4 (minus the references-exist portion of Check 2 and provider-specific semantic comparison in Check 3). Checks 5-6 and those semantic/reference checks are performed by the agent when `/skill-tester` is invoked -- a green script run alone does not mean they passed.

What This Skill Does NOT Do

• Does not test CI skills (use `skill-tester-ci` for those)
• Does not modify skills — reports findings only
• Does not run behavioral evals (trigger testing) — use skill-creator's `run_eval.py` for that
• Does not replace the eval-creator regression framework — this tests skill structure, not promoted rules