eval-builder

A process for creating a versioned set of real tasks that checks the quality of an AI-powered agent. The set acts like acceptance tests for probabilistic behavior.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to turn real failures and pre-release checks into graded cases for state, transcript, and answer quality.
Why use it?
Passing ordinary software tests does not show that an agent gives useful answers or reaches the right outcome across varied requests.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mckruz/claude-code-sdlc/eval-builder
Any agent
npx skills add MCKRUZ/claude-code-sdlc --skill eval-builder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/MCKRUZ/claude-code-sdlc

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 658 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00078 $0.00658
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00329
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00132
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00066

Measured 2d ago against content hash 08683794e760, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

eval-builder scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

harness/skills/eval-builder/SKILL.md · 44 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 44 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Eval builder

For LLM-powered work, "tests pass" is not sufficient verification. The golden set is the spec's acceptance criteria; CI runs it like tests, and a regression in it blocks a merge like a failing test. This skill builds one that actually tracks quality.

Procedure (grounded in Anthropic's agent-eval guidance)

  1. Start from real failures, small. 20–50 tasks is a strong start — drawn from the manual pre-release checks and the bug/support queue, not invented in the abstract. Each task is one a second person would grade the same way (unambiguous, with a reference answer).
  2. Pick graders deterministic-first. Prefer a state_check (did it reach the right end state?) or transcript_constraint (e.g. finished in ≤ N turns) over an LLM judge. Use an llm_rubric only for what rules can't capture (tone, explanation quality), and grade the output, not the path — don't assert an exact tool-call sequence; agents find valid routes you didn't predict.
  3. Compose multidimensional success where needed (state + transcript + rubric), with partial credit for multi-part tasks instead of all-or-nothing.
  4. Write it under eval-datasets/specs/<feature>/, referencing the spec file, versioned: eval-datasets/specs/<feature>/golden-set.yaml with spec: specs/NNNN-<feature>.md (use kit/eval-datasets/golden-set.template.yaml as the shape). Set the threshold the spec requires (e.g. ">= 95%").
  5. Plan for variance. Agents are stochastic — the suite runs multiple trials per task from a clean, isolated environment (so prior-trial state can't leak or be gamed). Note the trial count.

Calibrate before you gate

  • Validate the LLM judges against a few human-graded cases before trusting them; the regression trip-wire (~±3% is a practitioner starting point, not a constant) must be calibrated to the suite's measured variance before it becomes a required check.

Done when

  • A versioned golden-set.yaml exists under eval-datasets/specs/<feature>/ (referencing the spec file) with 20–50 grounded cases.
  • Graders are deterministic where possible; LLM rubrics grade output, not trajectory.
  • The threshold and trial count are set; the judge has been sanity-checked against human grades.

Read the full file on GitHub · 44 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 44 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A 08683794e760

Subscribe to this mod's changes

eval-builder is a skill published in the GitHub repository MCKRUZ/claude-code-sdlc (4 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 658 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.