Skilltracer Agent

The background agent that evaluates work and generates skills.

How It Works

After each task, Claude main spawns the skilltracer as a background agent. Claude main provides a task summary, but the skilltracer always independently scrapes the transcript to verify what actually happened. It never trusts the summary alone.

The agent operates in its own isolated context and never interferes with your main conversation.

Procedure

The skilltracer follows a fixed six-step procedure on every invocation:

  1. Get current project skills— queries the registry via registry --list to know what skills already exist
  2. Scrape transcript — mandatory step using scrape-transcript; independently verifies what work was done regardless of Claude main's summary
  3. Match work against existing skills— determines if the completed work maps to a known skill or represents something new
  4. Create new skills or version existing ones— generates a new skill when work is novel, or creates a new version when an existing skill has been improved
  5. Write skill body content— produces the full SKILL.md file via skill-write --prepare with step-by-step instructions, commands, and configurations
  6. Set skill metadata— attaches a description and tags via skill-meta --set for registry indexing

Skill-Derived Work

When a user invokes an existing skill, the skilltracer evaluates the result against the original skill definition. Three outcomes are possible:

  • Faithful reproduction— the work matches the skill exactly; no action is taken
  • Specialization— the work adapts the skill for a different context or technology; a new skill is created
  • Improvement— the work refines or extends the original approach; the existing skill is versioned

Evaluation Criteria

The skilltracer looks for work that is:

  • Complete — the task reached a working state
  • Reproducible — steps could be replayed in a fresh environment
  • Specific — concrete tools, commands, and configurations were used
  • Non-trivial — meaningful enough to save future effort

Agent Definition

The skilltracer agent is defined in agents/skilltracer.md. It contains the evaluation rubric, skill template, and versioning logic. The agent uses four primary tools: registry --list, scrape-transcript, skill-write --prepare, and skill-meta --set.