Don't Ship Agent Skills Naked: Eval First
AI Engineer · youtube · 2026-07-14
Philipp Schmid from Google DeepMind addresses a frequently overlooked issue in agent development: skills shouldn't be shipped after just a couple of manual tests—they require rigorous evaluation.
He points out that while agents may boast numerous skills, they are rarely tested. From an engineering standpoint, developers should establish lightweight eval harnesses for skills—just like deploying code—to proactively catch trigger failures, behavioral anomalies, and regressions.
The talk also covers skill definitions, how to write skills that trigger reliably, and a comprehensive reliability pipeline spanning construction, evaluation, and pre-deployment validation.
Related event: Experts Emphasize the Importance of AI Agent Evals(2 posts)→
More from coding & agent
- Ben Bajarin: Frontier AI is becoming the enterprise cyber-defense stack — BenBajarin · 2026-10-26
- Building AI bots on raw APIs? Devs say models are 'dumb without the harness' — madeofAjala · 2026-10-26
- HarnessMM cuts agent tokens per task by up to 88% while raising success rates — omarsar0 · 2026-10-26
- Microsoft demos intent-classifying agents built with Copilot App and Foundry, deployable across Teams and Outlook — marlene_zw · 2026-10-26
- Looking for a wearable mic with best battery life that feeds recordings to personal agents via MCP — altryne · 2026-10-26
- The identity crisis in software engineering: multiagent systems demand a new problem set — rakyll · 2026-10-26