Testing Skills With Subagents

Overview

Testing a skill is test-driven development applied to process documentation.

Run scenarios without the skill (RED — watch the agent fail), write the skill addressing those specific failures (GREEN — watch it comply), then close the loopholes it finds next (REFACTOR).

Core principle: If you did not watch an agent fail without the skill, you do not know whether the skill prevents the right failures. You know what you imagined it would prevent.

REQUIRED BACKGROUND: You must understand test-driven-development first — it defines the RED-GREEN-REFACTOR cycle. This skill provides the skill-specific test formats: pressure scenarios and rationalization tables.

Companion skills: creating-skills for the full authoring lifecycle, dispatching-parallel-agents for running scenarios concurrently.

Worked example: creating-skills/examples/AGENTS_MD_TESTING.md — a full test campaign across documentation variants.

When to Use

Test skills that: