Content
85%Weight 40%Scale 1-5Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.
A highly actionable, well-structured body: concrete workflows, worked examples, explicit validation gates and feedback loops, and clean one-level reference hygiene. The main weakness is redundancy — the Guidelines and Gotchas sections re-encode the Core Concepts and Verification sections at length, inflating token cost without adding new guidance.
Suggestions
Merge the 18-item Guidelines and 14-item Gotchas sections into a single consolidated quick-reference: roughly a third of their items restate Core Concepts verbatim (e.g., persistence-with-verification-gate appears in 'Persistence Cuts Both Ways', Guideline 5, and Gotcha 3).
Deduplicate the non-counting-outcomes/near-miss guidance, which is explained six times across Core Concepts, the anatomy table, the workflow, the pre-launch checklist, Guidelines, and Gotchas; keep the Core Concepts treatment and one-line pointers elsewhere.
Move the itemized restatements in 'Stop Conditions, Effort, and Progress State' and 'Lean and Outcome-First' that repeat Gotcha 8 and Gotcha 10 into the relevant reference files (research-evidence.md, vendor-guidance.md) to cut body length.
| Dimension | Reasoning | Score |
|---|---|---|
Conciseness | The body is dense, expert-level, and free of explanations of concepts Claude already knows, but the 18-item Guidelines and 14-item Gotchas sections substantially restate the Core Concepts sections — the persistence-with-verification-gate rule appears four times and non-counting outcomes are explained in six places. Not 4: the repetition is more than minor over-explanation; not 2: there is no padded fluff and nearly all content is novel, non-obvious guidance. | 3 / 5 |
Actionability | Fully actionable for an instruction-only skill: a 9-step Brief-Writing Workflow, three worked weak-to-strong examples (brief skeleton, root-cause-analysis brief, typed handoff contract with fields like "no_future_leakage: bool" and "VERIFY: <split-check command>; paste its output"), and a 13-question pre-launch evaluation checklist. Specific examples cover the common cases. Not 4: the guidance is copy-paste adaptable with only intentional template placeholders. | 5 / 5 |
Workflow Clarity | Clear sequences with explicit validation and feedback loops: workflow step 9 ("Red-team the brief before launch: ask a fresh model instance 'what is the cheapest way to make this look done...' and patch every answer... Stop when a pass finds only near misses that are already excluded"), the pre-launch rule "Any 'no' is a defect to fix, not a judgment call", and recall loops ("Route a failed check back to the responsible worker... with acceptance criteria, and a retry cap") plus "Run each check once on a known-bad input". This is not a destructive/batch skill, so no validation cap applies. | 5 / 5 |
Progressive Disclosure | Clear overview with well-signaled, one-level-deep references, all five of which exist on disk (cdc-prompt-annotated.md, vendor-guidance.md, research-evidence.md, task-brief-template.md, mass-handoff-contracts.md). Detail is appropriately split: the full annotated CDC prompt, dated vendor extracts, and MASS contract details live in references, signaled inline at point of use ("The annotated workflow... are in [the MASS reference](./references/mass-handoff-contracts.md)") and summarized with one-line descriptions in the References section. | 5 / 5 |
Total | 18 / 20 Passed |