| name | ai-skill-improve |
| description | Improves an existing skill based on real project pain (prior eval corpora under .ai-engineering/evals/, Engram cross-session observations, LESSONS.md, decision-store, instincts, proposals) by analysing the failure pattern, rewriting SKILL.md, and emitting the proposed delta as a PR comment only — no auto-merge. Trigger for 'improve this skill', 'improve /ai-plan', 'make /ai-review better', 'optimize all skills', 'batch improve skills'. Accepts a single skill name or 'all' for batch mode. Not for creating new skills from scratch; use /ai-scaffold instead. Not for platform audit; use /ai-ide-audit instead. |
| effort | mid |
| argument-hint | [skill-name]|all [--dry-run] |
| tags | ["meta","improvement","skills","optimization","improve"] |
ai-skill-improve
Evolves an existing skill by diagnosing real project pain (eval corpora, Engram observations, LESSONS.md, decisions, instincts, proposals), rewriting its SKILL.md, and emitting the delta as a PR comment only — never auto-merged. Use it to improve one named skill or all skills in batch.
Quick start
/ai-skill-improve ai-plan # evolve one skill
/ai-skill-improve all --dry-run # preview every skill
/ai-skill-improve all # batch evolve with evals
Pain sources: eval corpora (.ai-engineering/evals/), Engram observations (via
MemoryPort), LESSONS.md, decision-store, instincts, proposals. Owns pain
diagnosis + rewrite strategy; delegates the eval/grade/benchmark pipeline to
Anthropic's skill-creator. Output is PR-comment only — never auto-merged
(sub-007 M6).
Workflow
- Load contexts — read
.ai-engineering/manifest.yml providers.stacks; load .ai-engineering/overrides/<stack>/conventions.md for each stack plus .ai-engineering/overrides/_shared/conventions.md; load .ai-engineering/team/*.md for team conventions.
- Phase 0.5 — load corpora (
.ai-engineering/evals/<skill>.jsonl), Engram observations (/ai-memory MCP), and LESSONS.md H3 sections that mention the target skill.
- Phase 1 — load remaining pain context (decision-store, observations.yml, proposals.md).
- Phase 2 — analyze the target skill; score the 5 dimensions.
- Phase 3 — generate test prompts that exercise the failing pattern.
- Phase 4 — rewrite the skill (Start-Here, pain-injection, scope-gates, structured classification).
- Phase 5 — emit the proposed SKILL.md diff as a PR comment via
gh pr comment. Do not commit or push. Operator review is the merge gate.
- Phase 6 — verify improvement on the operator's branch (pass-rate delta vs prior iteration).
Detail: audit document skeleton, six-phase protocol (load → analyze → generate → rewrite → eval → verify), batch mode for all.
Common Mistakes
- Rewriting before reading the pain profile.
- Skipping
--dry-run on batch (you'll burn rate limits).
- Inventing test prompts that mirror the skill's own examples (no drift signal).
Examples
User: "the /ai-plan skill keeps producing decomposition that ignores constraint X. Improve it."
/ai-skill-improve ai-plan
Loads pain context (LESSONS.md, proposals.md), scores ai-plan on 5 dimensions,
generates 2-3 test prompts that exercise the failing pattern, rewrites SKILL.md,
hands off to skill-creator for eval, reports the delta. all --dry-run walks
every skill in priority-tier order and stops short of the eval pipeline.
Integration
Reads: decision-store.json, LESSONS.md, observations.yml, proposals.md, manifest.yml. Writes: target SKILL.md files. Calls: python scripts/sync_command_mirrors.py after rewrites. Delegates to: Anthropic skill-creator (eval/grade/benchmark, Phase 5). Feeds into: /ai-learn. See also: /ai-scaffold (new skills), /ai-ide-audit (cross-IDE).
$ARGUMENTS