write-changelog

Write a CHANGELOG.md entry for a new extension release. Use when: writing changelog, updating changelog, adding release notes, preparing a release, documenting milestone changes. Requires a milestone name and extension version number.

Quality

81%

Does it follow best practices?

Run evals on this skill

Adds up to 20 points to the overall score

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Securityby

Low

Low-risk findings worth noting

Quality

Content

90%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.

A tight, highly executable skill body with exact queries, templates, and classification rules plus a validation step. The only gaps are an explicit error-recovery loop and the over-50-line size that keeps two dimensions at 4.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Conciseness	The body is lean and assumes Claude's competence — it never explains what a changelog, milestone, or GitHub search is, and version numbers appear only as illustrative format examples rather than time-sensitive directives.	5 / 5
Actionability	It gives copy-paste-ready GitHub search queries, an exact markdown entry template, a concrete classification table, and precise per-section bullet formats, covering the common cases fully.	5 / 5
Workflow Clarity	The Gather→Classify→Write→Validate sequence is clear and includes an explicit validation checklist, which avoids the destructive/batch cap; however, there is no explicit validate→fix→retry feedback loop, leaving a minor gap.	4 / 5
Progressive Disclosure	Sections are well-organized and the content is appropriately self-contained for a focused single-task skill, but the body exceeds the 50-line simple-skill threshold (~67 lines) and has no external references, so the top anchor is not fully earned.	4 / 5
	Total	18 / 20 Passed

Description

73%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.

A strong, trigger-rich description that clearly states both capability and use conditions. Its main weakness is the imperative "Write" voice (second person) and a singular action that keeps specificity modest.

Suggestions

Reword the opening in third person to match rubric expectations, e.g. "Writes a CHANGELOG.md entry for a new extension release."

Add one or two more concrete capabilities (e.g. classifying issues/PRs, formatting Thank-You sections) to lift specificity beyond a single action.

Narrow the niche in the description by mentioning the GitHub milestone source so it is unmistakably distinct from generic release-note skills.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Specificity	Names the domain and one concrete action ("Write a CHANGELOG.md entry for a new extension release"), matching the anchor for 1-2 concrete actions; the imperative "Write" verb is second-person voice, which the guidelines penalize by reducing specificity by 1 from a base of 3.	2 / 5
Completeness	It explicitly answers both what (write a changelog entry for an extension release) and when (a concrete "Use when" trigger list), and adds a requires clause — the strongest anchor.	5 / 5
Trigger Term Quality	The "Use when" list supplies good natural-keyword coverage with synonyms ("writing changelog", "updating changelog", "adding release notes", "preparing a release", "documenting milestone changes") plus the filename CHANGELOG.md, though a few common phrasings are absent.	4 / 5
Distinctiveness Conflict Risk	The changelog-for-extension-release niche with milestone triggers is mostly distinct and low-conflict, but the description does not pin the microsoft/vscode-pull-request-github scope, leaving minor overlap risk with generic release-notes skills.	4 / 5
	Total	15 / 20 Passed

Validation

87%

Warnings & errors only

Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.

Validation — 14 / 16 Passed

Validation for skill structure

Criteria	Description	Result
frontmatter_unknown_keys	Unknown frontmatter key(s) found; consider removing or moving to metadata	Warning
relative_links	Relative link issues: 2 missing	Warning

	Total	14 / 16 Passed

Repository: microsoft/vscode-pull-request-github
Path: .github/skills/write-changelog/SKILL.md
Commit: 849821a

Reviewed: 6 days ago

Table of Contents

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