Evaluate agent skills before they bloat your context window

Google Cloud developers present a five-rule engineering playbook for evaluating coding agent skills to prevent context window bloat and routing failures. The authors advise developers to gate trigger collisions using open-source tools like skill-reach, run evaluations in isolated container sandboxes rather than developer laptops, measure paired performance with and without ablation, guard against benchmark reward-hacking, and encode compact operational habits instead of static documentation dumps. Open article →