exa-reliability-patterns
Implement Exa reliability patterns: query fallback chains, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation. Use when building fault-tolerant Exa integrations, implementing fallback strategies, or adding resilience to production search services. Trigger with phrases like "exa reliability", "exa circuit breaker", "exa fallback", "exa resilience", "exa graceful degradation".
89
88%
Does it follow best practices?
Impact
Pending
No eval scenarios have been run
Advisory
Suggest reviewing before use
Quality
Discovery
100%Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.
This is a well-crafted skill description that clearly defines its scope (Exa-specific reliability patterns), lists concrete actions, provides explicit 'Use when' guidance, and includes natural trigger phrases. It follows third-person voice correctly and is concise without being vague. The only minor improvement could be mentioning specific file types or code patterns, but overall it's strong.
| Dimension | Reasoning | Score |
|---|---|---|
Specificity | Lists multiple specific concrete actions: 'query fallback chains', 'circuit breakers', and 'graceful degradation'. These are distinct, well-defined reliability patterns rather than vague abstractions. | 3 / 3 |
Completeness | Clearly answers both 'what' (implement query fallback chains, circuit breakers, graceful degradation) and 'when' (building fault-tolerant Exa integrations, implementing fallback strategies, adding resilience to production search services), with explicit trigger phrases listed. | 3 / 3 |
Trigger Term Quality | Includes explicit trigger terms that users would naturally say: 'exa reliability', 'exa circuit breaker', 'exa fallback', 'exa resilience', 'exa graceful degradation'. These are natural phrases combining the product name with the specific pattern names. | 3 / 3 |
Distinctiveness Conflict Risk | Highly distinctive due to the specific combination of 'Exa' (a specific product/API) with reliability engineering patterns. Unlikely to conflict with generic reliability skills or generic Exa skills because it targets the intersection of both domains. | 3 / 3 |
Total | 12 / 12 Passed |
Implementation
77%Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.
This is a strong, highly actionable skill with executable TypeScript patterns covering the full reliability spectrum for Exa integrations. The workflow progression is logical and well-structured with clear validation points. The main weakness is verbosity—full class implementations inline make the skill long when briefer patterns with references to detailed files would be more token-efficient.
Suggestions
Consider extracting the full CircuitBreaker and SearchQualityMonitor class implementations into a separate reference file, keeping only usage patterns and key configuration values in SKILL.md.
Trim explanatory comments within code that Claude can infer (e.g., '// failures before opening', '// 30s before half-open') to reduce token usage.
| Dimension | Reasoning | Score |
|---|---|---|
Conciseness | The content is mostly efficient with executable code examples, but some patterns (circuit breaker, quality monitor) are fairly verbose implementations that Claude could generate from a brief description. The overview's mention of Exa-specific failure modes is valuable and concise, but the full class implementations could be trimmed to key patterns with notes. | 2 / 3 |
Actionability | All code examples are fully executable TypeScript with proper imports, error handling, and usage examples. The fallback chain, retry logic, circuit breaker, and degradation patterns are copy-paste ready with concrete Exa API calls and specific parameters. | 3 / 3 |
Workflow Clarity | The five steps form a clear progression from basic fallback to monitoring, each building on the previous. The degradation levels are explicitly numbered (Level 1-4), the retry logic includes clear conditions for when to retry vs throw, and the circuit breaker has explicit state transitions with validation (half-open testing). The error handling table serves as a quick-reference validation checkpoint. | 3 / 3 |
Progressive Disclosure | The skill references related skills (exa-policy-guardrails, exa-architecture-variants) and external docs, which is good. However, the content is quite long (~180 lines of code) and could benefit from splitting the full class implementations into separate reference files, keeping SKILL.md as an overview with key patterns and pointers. No bundle files exist to offload detail. | 2 / 3 |
Total | 10 / 12 Passed |
Validation
81%Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.
Validation — 9 / 11 Passed
Validation for skill structure
| Criteria | Description | Result |
|---|---|---|
allowed_tools_field | 'allowed-tools' contains unusual tool name(s) | Warning |
frontmatter_unknown_keys | Unknown frontmatter key(s) found; consider removing or moving to metadata | Warning |
Total | 9 / 11 Passed | |
- Commit
3a2d27d
- Reviewed
Table of Contents
Is this your skill?
If you maintain this skill, you can claim it as your own. Once claimed, you can manage eval scenarios, bundle related skills, attach documentation or rules, and ensure cross-agent compatibility.