SkillEvaluator Mastery

A short course on NVIDIA SkillEvaluator, the open-source framework for testing agent skills, taught from what this repository learned by running it on twelve portfolio-management skills: the real costs, the real bugs, and the settings that are easy to get wrong.

It is for engineers and product owners who write agent skills and want to know whether a skill is well formed, whether it duplicates one that already exists, and whether it actually makes an agent better.

How the course works

1. Read the eight modules in order. Each one covers one part of SkillEvaluator and ends with a short multiple-choice check. Your answers are marked as soon as you submit them.
2. Work through the troubleshooting scenarios. Eight problems people actually hit, each with a diagnosis to choose.
3. Take the final exam. Fifteen questions across every module; 80% passes.

The hands-on tutorial has you scaffold a toy skill and run Tier 1 against it for free. The reference collects every command, setting, and finding in one place.

Reading the course costs nothing. Running SkillEvaluator's Tier 1 is also free and offline, but a full Tier 3 run against a live agent cost this repository $15-45 per skill, so the modules say clearly which steps need credentials or money.

Your progress and quiz scores are saved in this browser only. Nothing is sent anywhere.

The modules

1. Module 1What it is and whyThe four tiers, what each one costs, and what SkillEvaluator leaves to you.
2. Module 2Tier 1: construction and securityFree, offline checks for schema, quality, and security on every pull request.
3. Module 3Tier 2: similarityCatching near-duplicate skills, and the embedding-provider trap.
4. Module 4Tier 3: live-agent evaluationMeasuring Skill Lift with a live agent and judge, and what that costs.
5. Module 5Tier 4: domain gradersWriting reusable graders that judge domain correctness.
6. Module 6Installing and runningInstall options, pinning an exact commit, and checking the install.
7. Module 7Skill package layoutThe folder layout and frontmatter that Tier 1 checks.
8. Module 8Reports, CI/CD, and real bugsReading reports, wiring CI, and four problems this repository hit.

Other ways to take it

• As a ten-slide overview. The Skills Ledger is a crash course on why skill governance matters and what this repository's real runs found.
• As one file. Download the course as a single HTML page that works offline.
• With a coding agent. The same material is an agent skill, skills/skillevaluator-mastery/, that teaches it as a conversation and writes fresh questions each time. In a checkout of this repository, say skillevalexpert to Claude Code, Codex, or GitHub Copilot.