happier: Skill for Claude Code

Happier Instruction Evaluation

Evaluate whether instruction wording changes agent behavior without telling the agents they are being evaluated. This workflow is advisory: it produces evidence for a human decision and never edits the canonical instruction owner by itself.

1. Establish the decision

Name:

• the instruction owner and variants being compared, including the current baseline;
• the concrete behavior the change is meant to improve or failure it is meant to prevent;
• one organic task or a small risk-selected set of tasks that can expose that difference;
• a rubric of observable outcomes fixed before any run;
• the user decision the evidence will inform.

Do not evaluate prose elegance in isolation. A useful task forces the instruction to affect routing, investigation, ownership, implementation shape, validation, stopping, or reporting. Skip evaluation when a source inspection or deterministic check can decide the question directly.

2. Control the comparison

Hold constant everything except the instruction variant when practical:

• use the same task prompt, repository basis, allowed tools, permissions, time/effort budget, and available evidence;
• give each run only the ordinary context an agent would receive for that task;
• label variants and output locations neutrally so neither runner nor judge sees “baseline,” “preferred,” model identity, or another run's existence;
• isolate writes in separate temporary directories or authorized worktrees; never switch, clean, reset, stash, or overwrite the primary shared checkout;
• prevent external mutations, destructive actions, secrets, and sensitive-data access unless the user separately authorizes that exact evaluation surface.

Do not freeze or package a release representation. Temporary instruction variants and isolated outputs are test inputs, not release artifacts.

3. Keep runners blind

Each runner receives an organic-looking engineering request, not an evaluation brief. Do not mention the rubric, competing variants, expected lesson, or favored outcome. Do not ask the runner whether it followed the instruction.