Skill Trigger Tester

What it does

OpenClaw maps user intent to skills by matching the user's message against each skill's

description:

field. A weak description means your skill silently never fires. A description that's too broad means it fires when it shouldn't.

Skill Trigger Tester helps you validate the trigger quality of a skill's description before publishing. You give it:

• The description string you're testing
• A set of "should fire" prompts (true positives)
• A set of "should not fire" prompts (true negatives)

It scores precision, recall, and gives an overall trigger quality grade (A–F) plus actionable suggestions.

When to invoke

• Before publishing any new skill to ClawHub
• When a skill you expect to trigger isn't firing
• When a skill keeps firing on irrelevant prompts
• Inside

  create-skill

  workflow (Step 5: validation)

Scoring model

The tool uses a keyword + semantic overlap heuristic against the description field:

Metric	Meaning
Recall	% of "should fire" prompts that would match
Precision	% of matches that are actually "should fire"
F1	Harmonic mean of recall and precision

Grade thresholds:

Grade	F1
A	≥ 0.85
B	≥ 0.70
C	≥ 0.55
D	≥ 0.40
F	< 0.40

How to use

python3 test.py --description "Diagnoses skill discovery failures" \
  --should-fire "why isn't my skill loading" \
               "my skill disappeared from the registry" \
               "check if my skills are healthy" \
  --should-not-fire "write a skill" \
                    "install superpowers" \
                    "review my code"

python3 test.py --file skill-spec.yaml    # Load test cases from YAML file
python3 test.py --format json             # Machine-readable output

Test spec file format

description: "Diagnoses skill discovery failures — YAML parse errors, path violations"
should_fire:
  - "why isn't my skill loading"
  - "my skill disappeared"
  - "check skill health"
should_not_fire:
  - "write a new skill"
  - "install openclaw"

Procedure

Step 1 — Write your test cases

For each skill you're testing, list 3–5 prompts that should trigger it and 3–5 that should not. Be honest about edge cases.

Step 2 — Run the scorer

python3 test.py --description "<your description>" \
  --should-fire "..." --should-not-fire "..."

Step 3 — Interpret results

• Grade A/B: description is well-calibrated. Publish.
• Grade C: borderline — add more specific keywords to the description, or narrow the wording.
• Grade D/F: description is too vague or uses jargon the user won't say. Rewrite and retest.

Step 4 — Iterate

Try alternative descriptions and compare scores side-by-side using

--compare

.

Step 5 — Add test file to the skill directory

Commit the

trigger-tests.yaml

spec alongside the skill. Future contributors can run it to verify trigger quality hasn't regressed.

Common mistakes

• Too generic:

  "Helps with skills"

  — will either never fire or fire on everything
• Technical jargon:

  "Validates SKILL.md frontmatter schema coherence"

  — users don't say this
• Action + object only:

  "Creates skills"

  — add when/why context
• Missing synonyms: If users might say "check" or "verify" or "test", the description needs to capture the semantic range

Output example

Skill Trigger Quality — skill-doctor
─────────────────────────────────────────────
Description: "Diagnoses silent skill discovery failures..."

Should fire (5 prompts):    4 / 5 matched   recall    = 0.80
Should not fire (5 prompts): 1 / 5 matched  precision = 0.80
F1 score: 0.80   Grade: B

⚠ 1 false negative: "check if skills are healthy"
   Suggestion: Add "healthy", "health", or "check" to the description.

⚠ 1 false positive: "check my code"
   Suggestion: Narrow description to avoid generic "check" overlap.