Dev-Skills

By the time I was maintaining the fifteenth or so skill in dev-skills, I realized I had no reliable way to tell whether any of them actually worked. Every demo produced clean output. But the output had no control group, no causal grounding — I knew what happened with the skill mounted, not what would have happened without it. How I Was Judging at the Start # The original method was simple: write a skill, load it into Claude Code, run a task, check whether the output looked right. The first version of grill passed this way — I fed it a service design with a concurrency bug, the agent flagged a lock contention issue, I marked it valid.

Let me start with something that actually happened. In early 2025, I added a feature to an internal system: export to Excel. Small requirement — I didn’t even write it up, just typed “add an export button to the list page” into the chat box. The AI delivered in ten minutes. Frontend changes, new endpoint, SQL — all in one pass. I was pleased when I opened the PR, right up until review revealed: the export columns didn’t match the list page, a hundred thousand rows would hang the service outright, there was no permission check, and the tests only covered the happy path.