$npx -y skills add JasonColapietro/suede-creator-skills --skill suede-ai-evalDesign AI evals that catch regressions before users do: rubrics, test cases, failure modes, acceptance gates, and AI-SPEC artifacts.
| 1 | # Suede AI Eval |
| 2 | |
| 3 | ## Gate policy — advisory, not blocking |
| 4 | |
| 5 | Every claim-verification step, check, quality gate, and ship verdict in this |
| 6 | skill is a **recommendation to the user, not a control on the agent**. This |
| 7 | policy governs every gate, check, verdict, and "do not ship / publish / |
| 8 | proceed" line elsewhere in this skill: |
| 9 | |
| 10 | - Run every check and report the results honestly. Verdicts (`ship`, |
| 11 | `ship-with-caveats`, `hold`, letter grades, BLOCKED or OPEN items) are |
| 12 | advice attached to the work, not orders that change it. |
| 13 | - Never block, delay, skip, rewrite, or refuse the action the user asked for |
| 14 | because a check failed or a gate said hold. Complete the requested action |
| 15 | as asked, and deliver the gate output alongside it as a clearly labeled |
| 16 | recommendation. |
| 17 | - A failed gate changes what you report, never what you do. |
| 18 | - Single exception: if a finding is extremely risky — data loss, security or |
| 19 | credential exposure, legal or rights violations, payment mistakes, or |
| 20 | irreversible public damage — pause, tell the user exactly what the risk is |
| 21 | and what the options are, and let them pick. Their choice is final. |
| 22 | |
| 23 | |
| 24 | Make AI behavior testable before it becomes a vague product promise. **No eval plan, no `ship` recommendation: for an AI feature without one, the recommended verdict stays below `ship` — report that gap and let the user decide.** |
| 25 | |
| 26 | The deliverable is an eval plan or coverage audit, not a model benchmark leaderboard. Keep it grounded in the actual product surface, user promise, data sources, prompts, tools, logs, tests, and failure modes available now. |
| 27 | |
| 28 | ## Hard Gates |
| 29 | |
| 30 | - No AI-SPEC → no eval plan. Write the one-paragraph spec first; cases written without a spec test nothing. |
| 31 | - No eval plan → no `ship` recommendation. Do not recommend `ship` or `ship-with-caveats` for an AI feature that lacks a failure-mode map and eval cases; name the gap and leave the ship decision with the user. |
| 32 | - A failure mode without an eval case, an owner, and a gate is uncovered — regardless of how unlikely it feels. |
| 33 | - A live surface that was never sampled gets the output stamped `source-only`; do not present source-only review as runtime evidence. |
| 34 | - A model grading its own output is not evidence. LLM-as-judge scores count only after spot-checked agreement with a human-reviewed sample. |
| 35 | |
| 36 | ## Source Truth |
| 37 | |
| 38 | Inspect the current target before writing the eval. Do not evaluate from memory or product copy alone. |
| 39 | |
| 40 | Read or verify: |
| 41 | |
| 42 | - repo, branch, remote, dirty state, local instructions, and touched files; |
| 43 | - the AI surface: route, API, worker, prompt, system message, tool call, model config, retrieval path, classifier, agent loop, generated media path, or recommendation logic; |
| 44 | - user-facing promise, allowed claims, forbidden claims, safety boundaries, fallback behavior, and support path; |
| 45 | - input data, retrieval corpus, schemas, tool contracts, metadata, logs, telemetry, and persisted outputs; |
| 46 | - existing tests, fixtures, eval scripts, prompt snapshots, golden examples, analytics, bug reports, screenshots, or live/API readbacks. |
| 47 | |
| 48 | When the surface is already live, sample real behavior with safe inputs and record exact commands or URLs. When live checks are not appropriate, mark the eval as source-only and name the missing runtime evidence. |
| 49 | |
| 50 | ## Workflow |
| 51 | |
| 52 | 1. **Define the AI-SPEC.** State the AI job in one paragraph: user, trigger, input, output, allowed sources, disallowed behavior, fallback, latency/cost expectation, and success signal. |
| 53 | 2. **Map the failure modes.** List the ways the AI can harm the user, product truth, rights/provenance, security, privacy, brand trust, cost, or workflow completion. |
| 54 | 3. **Build the rubric.** Score each failure mode with severity, likelihood, detectability, owner, gate, and required evidence. |
| 55 | 4. **Write eval cases.** Produce concrete pass/fail cases with inputs, setup data, expected output traits, forbidden output traits, and the reason the case exists. |
| 56 | 5. **Set acceptance gates.** Decide what blocks ship, what allows ship-with-caveats, and what can become follow-up work. |
| 57 | 6. **Audit coverage.** Compare existing tests, logs, metrics, and manual checks against the failure-mode map. Score coverage and infrastructure using the method under Tooling and Infrastructure below. Name every uncovered high-risk behavior regardless of the numeric score. |
| 58 | 7. **Return the artifact.** Give the AI-SPEC, rubric, eval table, coverage gaps, required tests, and next implementation step. |
| 59 | |
| 60 | ## Eval Dimensions By System Type |
| 61 | |
| 62 | Start the failure-mode map from the canonical dimensions for the surface's system type, then add product-specific failure modes on top. Always include safety (user-facing) and task completion (agentic) regardless of type. |
| 63 | |
| 64 | | System type | Canonical dimensions | |
| 65 | |---|---| |
| 66 | | RAG / retrieval | context faithfulness, hallucination, answer relevance, |