Tutorial: Evaluate candidates

The Evaluate stage is where you decide which skill to install. You have a list of candidates from Discover; now you read their details, compare them side-by-side, and check the diff if you are upgrading from a previous version.

These tutorials show Skillsmith in Claude Code. For installation in your preferred runtime (Cursor, Continue, Copilot, Windsurf), see Getting Started.

What you will do

• Read the full details of a single skill
• Compare two to five skills side-by-side
• View a diff between two installed versions of the same skill
• Use trust tiers and quality scores to make a confident choice

Tools that map to Evaluate

Step 1 — Read a skill's full details

Once Discover gives you a skill ID like community/jest-helper, ask Skillsmith for its full record before deciding to install.

Try these prompts:

• "Show details for community/jest-helper"
• "What does the git-commit skill do?"
• "Read me the description of community/playwright-utils"

The response includes:

• The full description from the skill's SKILL.md
• Trust tier and quality score
• Repository and homepage URLs (when declared by the author)
• Compatibility tags (which agent runtimes, IDEs, and platforms it supports)
• An also_installed array — skills that users frequently install alongside this one. Only surfaces after five or more co-installs.

Step 2 — Compare candidates side-by-side

When you have two or three plausible candidates, ask Skillsmith to lay them out in a comparison table. The MCP skill_compare tool accepts 2-5 skill IDs.

Try these prompts:

• "Compare community/jest-helper and community/vitest-helper"
• "Show me a side-by-side of these three testing skills"
• "Which is better for a Vite project: jest-helper or vitest-helper?"

The output is a table with each skill in a column and rows for description, trust tier, quality score, install count, dependencies, compatibility, and last-updated date. Use it to spot the differences that matter to your project.

Step 3 — Diff two versions before upgrading

If you already have a skill installed and Maintain is telling you a newer version exists, the Evaluate stage's skill_diff tool shows you exactly what changed before you upgrade.

Try this prompt:

• "Diff my installed jest-helper against the latest version"

Or run it from the CLI for a side-by-side terminal view:

skillsmith diff community/jest-helper

The diff shows changes to SKILL.md content, dependencies, and any bundled scripts or assets. Skip the upgrade if the diff includes something that breaks your workflow; fall through to pinning in Maintain to lock yourself to the safe version.

Step 4 — Read trust badges deliberately

The five trust tiers carry different review processes. Treat them literally:

Full criteria are documented on the Trust Tiers page.

Common pitfalls

Comparison returns "skill not found"

Skill IDs are case-sensitive and require the author/name form. jest-helper alone does not resolve; community/jest-helper does. If Discover returned only the name, prefix it with the trust tier (most often community/) or the author's GitHub org.

Diff is empty even though I expect changes

The diff compares your installed version against the registry's latest. If the registry copy is stale (the indexer runs four times a day), the diff will look empty. Check the registry version with "Show details for <skill>" first.

Where to next

You have a winner. Now install it and learn how to invoke it — that is the Install & Use tutorial.

Reference: MCP get_skill · CLI info · Trust Tiers.

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