Optimizing Skills

Treat the skill document as the parameter under optimization: change it only when the change demonstrably beats the version you already ship. This is the discipline distilled from SkillOpt (microsoft/SkillOpt, arXiv:2605.23904) — its training apparatus dropped, its reproducibility discipline kept. The point is to stop editing skills on intuition and start editing them on evidence.

Core principle

A skill edit is only worth shipping if it strictly improves measured behavior on a held-out check. Most edits that feel like improvements don't move the needle, and some quietly regress. The gate below is what separates a real improvement from a confident guess.

The gate — run it every revision