Migrate from skill review to Tessl Review

How to switch from tessl skill review to Tessl Review, and what to expect

Tessl Skill Review lets you quickly evaluate the quality of a skill against best practices, providing scores on validation, content and description quality. It is being superseded by Tessl Review.

This page explains what is changing, the impact on how skill quality is scored, and how to switch.

Tessl Skill Review is deprecated. It still works and remains available through July 2026, after which it will be removed. Switch to Tessl Review before then.

What's changed, and why

Tessl Review brings skill review into Tessl's wider agentic evaluation architecture.

Tessl Skill Review evaluated individual SKILL.md files in a single pass against a fixed rubric. With Tessl Review, the review runs through an agent that works across the whole skill and its connected files, and reasons over multiple steps to reach its result.

This allows us to introduce several improvements:

• Full-bundle review. The review reads your entire skill, not just SKILL.md. References, scripts, and assets are all in scope, so nothing in your skill is missed.
• Customisable rubric. Fork the default quality scoring rubric and define what "good" means for your organisation. Set it as your workspace default and every review uses your standard.
• Review history. Reviews are stored and queryable with tessl review list and tessl review view, so you have a persistent record of quality over time.
• Built for CI. --json and --threshold gate pull requests on a review score, exactly as before.

Scores returned by Tessl Review may differ slightly from skill review. Because the review now runs as an agent over your full skill bundle rather than a single pass, Tessl Review scores are more accurate and more reflective of real skill quality. And because the agent reasons over multiple steps, it can reach a clearer, better-founded conclusion than skill review's single pass.

The shift to Tessl Review also makes it easier for us to expand what reviews can do. You can now run a security scan directly from the CLI with tessl review run security — see Protect against insecure skills. Coming soon:

• Choose the model a review runs on.

What changes on the CLI

Both tools now require authentication. To bring skill review in line with Tessl Review, running a review with either tessl skill review or tessl review run now requires you to be signed in. Sign in with tessl login, or set a TESSL_TOKEN API key in CI.

Most workflows map across directly:

Workflow	Deprecated (tessl skill review)	New (Tessl Review)
Run a review	tessl skill review <path>	tessl review run <path>
Review one skill from a plugin	tessl skill review --skill <name> <path>	Point tessl review run at the skill's directory
Improve a skill automatically	tessl skill review --optimize	tessl review fix
Gate CI on a score	--threshold <score>	--threshold <score> (unchanged)
Output machine-readable results	--json	--json (unchanged)
Limit improvement iterations	--max-iterations (with --optimize)	--max-iterations (on tessl review fix)
Auto-apply fixes without prompting	--yes (with --optimize)	--yes (on tessl review fix)
Attribute a run to a workspace	-	--workspace (new)
Score against a custom rubric	-	--review-plugin (new)
Label a run for history	-	--label (new)
Force a fresh run	-	--force (new)

What stays the same:

• The default rubric (Anthropic best practices) is unchanged. Reviews still score the same three components out of the box: validation, description, and content.
• Reviews still produce a 0-100 score.
• --json with --threshold still gates CI through the exit code.
• The GitHub Action still drives reviews in CI.

What's new to know:

• Authentication. tessl review run and tessl review fix run against your workspace, so you need to be signed in (tessl login, or a TESSL_TOKEN API key in CI) and run against a workspace (pass --workspace, or pick one when prompted). Any workspace member can run reviews.
• Asynchronous by default. A review runs server-side. tessl review run polls until it finishes and then prints the score, so a single command still feels the same. Press Ctrl+C to detach and pick the run back up later with tessl review view --last.

Migrating your CI

Replace the tessl skill review step with tessl review run, add a workspace, and keep your threshold:

tessl review run ./my-skill --workspace <workspace> --json --threshold 80

--workspace is required when --json is set, because a non-interactive run cannot prompt for one. In CI, authenticate with a TESSL_TOKEN repository secret. For a complete GitHub Actions workflow, see Review, lint & publish with GitHub Actions.

Next steps

• Check a skill's quality using review - the full guide to running reviews, customising the rubric, and gating CI
• tessl review run reference - all flags
• Review, lint & publish with GitHub Actions - run reviews on pull requests