> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://docs.tessl.io/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://docs.tessl.io/improving-your-skills/overview-improving-skills-and-plugins.md). # Overview - Improving skills and plugins Tessl is evolving, one of the main pillars is the visibility and tools available to ensure your skills actually work! Tessl provides a number of capabilities to assess your skills and plugins to validate *quality*, *actionability* and *outcomes*. Think of Tessl as a toolkit. Often users use the terms "review", "eval" and "evaluations" interchangeably, or in Tessl you have lint, review, and several types of evals, but at the end of the day, there are tools with different capabilities that are designed to help make your skills better. Let's review these capabilities and how they work, click the link to see documentation and examples: | Capability/documentation | Use case | Helpful information | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | [Lint](/improving-your-skills/evaluating-skills.md#reviewing-skills-locally) | Test packaging of skills into a Tessl plugin. | | | [Review](/improving-your-skills/evaluating-skills.md) & [Optimize](/improving-your-skills/optimize-a-skill-using-best-practices.md) | Use LLM to judge if skill conforms to best practices, like Skill standard. An example would be if the Description field matches best practices, so that it will activate, which is something often incorrectly set. You can use the Optimize option to take the recommendations, preview changes, and then accept them to be automatically applied. | | | [Tessl Review](/improving-your-skills/tessl-review.md) | The same review as an authenticated, asynchronous, server-side run. This is the path for reviewing as a signed-in user, scoring against a custom rubric, and gating CI on a review score. | | | [Scenario based evaluations](/improving-your-skills/evaluate-skill-quality-using-scenarios.md) | Tessl lets you run end-to-end task evaluations for your skills directly from the CLI. You generate a set of scenarios, run an agent against them, and see how well it performs — with and without your skill injected. This workflow is designed for fast, repeatable iteration as you develop and refine a skill, without building your own eval harness. | | | [Evaluate codebase agent readiness](/improving-your-skills/evaluating-your-codebase.md) | How well your context files (skills, rules, documentation) enable an AI agent to complete real tasks on your codebase. It covers scenario definition, running agents with different setups, testing variations, and comparing results. | | | [Agent session analysis](https://tessl.io/blog/audit-log-evaluations/) | An official skill to perform agent session analysis to optimize your skills. Discover friction points your agent is having and improve performance using Tessl's powerful logging tools. | [try-tessl/agent-quality](https://tessl.io/registry/try-tessl/agent-quality) | ## Evals vs Reviews The **Lint** & **Review Skills** feature reviews the skills against best practice, whereas **Evaluations** actually generates *scenarios* and then validates the quality of the skill, by testing if agents perform better against those scenarios with the skill. You use *both* Evaluations and Reviews to make a better plugin. It's also important to note there are two ways to source the scenarios you evaluate against: synthetic tests based on what the skill says it does (see [Evaluate skill quality using scenarios](/improving-your-skills/evaluate-skill-quality-using-scenarios.md)), or reproducing a real commit with context provided (see [Evaluate codebase agent readiness](/improving-your-skills/evaluating-your-codebase.md)). --- # Agent Instructions This documentation is published with GitBook. GitBook is the documentation platform designed so that both humans and AI agents can read, navigate, and reason over technical content effectively. Learn more at gitbook.com. ## Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter, and the optional `goal` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.tessl.io/improving-your-skills/overview-improving-skills-and-plugins.md?ask=&goal= ``` `ask` is the immediate question: it should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. `goal` is optional and describes the broader end goal you are ultimately trying to accomplish on behalf of the user. GitBook uses it to tailor the answer towards what is most useful for that goal. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.