Define your own quality standards

Fork the default review rubric to encode your organisation's quality bar, then apply it to every review.

Takeaway The default review rubric scores against general best practices. Fork it to encode what your organisation cares about, then apply it everywhere: local reviews, automated fixes, and your CI gate.

The default rubric is a good baseline, but it does not know your conventions. If your team has its own bar for what a skill must do, a custom reviewer plugin lets you define it once and apply it consistently.

Build a reviewer

The create-review-plugin skill from tessl/review-plugin-creator scaffolds a reviewer plugin for you. Install it, then ask your agent to create a reviewer:

tessl install tessl/review-plugin-creator

A reviewer plugin is a standard Tessl plugin with this layout:

<plugin-name>/
├── .tessl-plugin/
│   └── plugin.json
└── skills/skill-reviewer/
    ├── SKILL.md
    ├── references/
    │   ├── config.json
    │   └── rubrics/
    │       └── <judge-name>.json   (one per judge)

config.json sets the weight each judge contributes to the final score, plus a validation_weight for the deterministic validation pass. All weights must sum to 1.0:

validation_weight + sum of judge weights = 1.0

Set validation_weight to 0.0 to exclude validation from scoring. Validation still runs as a gate but does not affect the numeric score.

Each rubric file defines one judge: what it evaluates (evaluation_target), a scoring scale, and a set of dimensions. Dimension weights within a single rubric also sum to 1.0. The create-review-plugin skill validates the finished plugin by running tessl review run against a test skill, so you catch misconfigured weights before you use it.

The default rubric is worth forking rather than building from scratch. It scores a skill's description on specificity, completeness, trigger term quality, and distinctiveness, and the content on conciseness, actionability, workflow clarity, and progressive disclosure. Forking keeps those dimensions and lets you adjust weights, remove ones that do not apply, or add judges of your own.

Use a reviewer

Point a review at your reviewer with --review-plugin, passing either a local directory or a workspace/plugin registry reference:

tessl review run ./my-skill --workspace engteam --review-plugin <reviewer-plugin>

The same flag works with tessl review fix and in your CI gate:

tessl review run ./my-skill --workspace engteam --review-plugin <reviewer-plugin> --threshold 80

Pass --review-plugin explicitly on each run, or configure a workspace default, so the flag is not required at all.

Setting workspace policy

Rather than passing --review-plugin on every run, you can set your reviewer plugin as the default for an entire workspace. Once set, any review run that does not name its own reviewer uses your plugin automatically, so contributors do not need to remember the flag. A run that passes an explicit --review-plugin (or an upload override) still takes precedence, so the workspace default is the automatic choice rather than a non-bypassable rule.

To configure this, open the workspace settings in the Tessl web app and navigate to the Reviews section. Select Manage, enter your reviewer plugin reference (for example myorg/my-reviewer or a pinned version such as myorg/my-reviewer@1.2.3), and save. The reviewer plugin you choose becomes the workspace default, applied to every review run that does not override it.

You still need the customReviewPlugins entitlement to use this feature. Contact your workspace owner if the Reviews section is not visible in your settings.

Next

• Gate skill quality in CI - enforce your rubric automatically on pull requests.