Skill Benchmark

Grade any plugin or skills folder against the frontier bar for what makes skills and plugins good. The output is an evidence-backed report: where the pack sits, what's fat vs. thin, what should be combined/split/parameterized, and the prioritized, boundary-carrying moves worth stealing.

This skill follows the very discipline it grades: a deterministic measurement script does the counting (so numbers are never eyeballed), and the latent judgment — scoring, diagnosis, recommendations — is the agent's job, grounded in the reference standard. The script and references ship alongside this SKILL.md; invoke them with the relative paths below.

Inputs

• Target (required): a path to a plugin directory, a folder of skills, or a whole repo. The skill auto-discovers every SKILL.md underneath.
• Goal of the pack (infer or ask once): is it a vertical "everything-in-a-box" bundle, a focused capability plugin, or a teaching demonstration? The bar differs — grade against intent, not a single absolute.

If no target is given, ask for the path before doing anything else.

The procedure (five phases)

Phase 1 — Frame: what is this pack trying to be?

Before measuring, establish intent (one short paragraph). Read the pack's README / top-level manifest if present, and skim 2–3 skill descriptions. Decide which archetype it is — it sets which scorecard dimensions matter most:

• Vertical "in-a-box" bundle (PM OS analog): expect tiering (system / workflow-orchestrator / reusable-leaf) and, past ~40 skills, tested routing.
• Focused capability plugin: expect a router + a handful of real leaves; routing tests are overkill below ~40 skills.
• Teaching / demonstration pack: thin and testless is correct — say so and grade gently.

Phase 2 — Measure (deterministic; never guess the numbers)

Run the bundled measurement script against the target:

python3 scripts/measure.py <target-path>
# JSON for your own downstream use:
python3 scripts/measure.py <target-path> --json -o /tmp/bench.json

scripts/measure.py ships alongside this skill (stdlib-only, no network). It reports: skill count; SKILL.md body line min/median/max + size bands (tiny/leaf/deep/fat); per-skill footprint (body + co-located refs + scripts); the always-loaded catalog token estimate vs the ~7K budget; the pack-level signals that the frontier treats as the defining properties of a skill pack (deterministic scripts, unit/integration tests, LLM evals, resolver/routing tests, reachability gate, hooks, learnings store, distribution manifests); and description-overlap candidates (pairs most likely to mis-route).

Take the numbers as given — your job is to interpret them, not re-derive them.

Phase 3 — Grade against the 15-dimension scorecard

Read references/scorecard.md and fill one row per dimension, grading each ✅ at/ahead of frontier · ⚠️ present-but-weak · ❌ gap, with the measured evidence and a one-line so-what. To grade the judgment-depth dimensions (1, 5, 9, 12) you must read actual files, not just the counts: open the 2–3 fattest and 2–3 thinnest SKILL.md bodies and judge whether the lines are encoded judgment (multi-phase procedure, interaction contract, verification loop) or boilerplate/padding. The bar and the real frontier numbers are in references/frontier-benchmark.md — cite it.

A signal the script can't see: when grading the deterministic substrate (dim 3), spot-read a script or two and ask the Foxconn-factory question — is this exact work (math, parsing, validation) or code written to distrust the model? Only the former earns its keep (see references/frontier-benchmark.md §7).

Phase 4 — Diagnose: fat enough? combine? split? parameterize?

For each plugin or skill group, classify it Hold / Fatten / Parameterize-or- combine / Split using the framework in references/scorecard.md. Anchor every call in evidence:

• Use the size bands to spot thin skills doing deep jobs (→ Fatten).
• Use the overlap candidates as the shortlist for Parameterize-or-combine, but only recommend combining when the process is the same and only the input/depth varies — otherwise keep them split (the god-skill anti-pattern).
• Flag the ~40-skill threshold explicitly if the pack is at/over it with no resolver eval or reachability audit.

Phase 5 — Report: prioritized moves with boundaries

Produce the final report (structure below). Pull recommendations from the prioritized "what to steal" list in references/scorecard.md (P1–P7), and carry each boundary — when NOT to do the move. Always include a "keep what you already lead on" section so a later refactor doesn't delete a strength.

Output format

Deliver a single report with these sections:

1. Verdict in one screen — archetype, the headline gap, and the single highest-leverage move, in ~5 sentences.
2. The numbers — a compact table from measure.py (skills, body min/median/max, bands, catalog tokens, signals).
3. Scorecard — the 15-row table, graded, with evidence.
4. Diagnosis — per plugin/group: Hold / Fatten / Combine / Split, with the reason.
5. Prioritized moves — the P1–P7 steal-list filtered to what this pack actually needs, each with its boundary.
6. Keep (don't regress) — the dimensions the pack already leads on.

Lead with what's measured; present judgment calls as judgment. Never inflate a grade the evidence doesn't support — an unbacked benchmark is worse than none.

Boundaries (when this skill does NOT apply)

• Authoring one skill → use a skill-creator, not this.
• Running a pack's own test suite → that's the pack's CI, not a benchmark.
• Grading a deliberate demonstration pack as if it were production → don't; thin + testless is the correct shape for teaching the format.
• Cargo-culting frontier features → every recommendation must carry its boundary. Fat ≠ verbose; tests ≠ a Foxconn factory; an explicit resolver below ~40 skills is overhead, not progress.

What to read

• references/frontier-benchmark.md — the standard: the frontier packs and their real numbers, the core patterns (thin-harness/fat-skills, latent vs. deterministic, skill-as-method-call, the tested bundle, resolver routing, the complexity ratchet + Foxconn counter-weight), the anatomy of fat with verified line counts, and the size-budget discipline. Read before grading.
• references/scorecard.md — the 15-dimension rubric, the Hold/Fatten/Combine/Split diagnosis framework, and the prioritized P1–P7 steal list with boundaries.
• scripts/measure.py — the deterministic measurement tool (ships with this skill; run it, don't reimplement it).