Migrate from skill review to Tessl Review
Tessl Skill Review let you quickly evaluate the quality of a skill against best practices, providing scores on validation, content and description quality. It has been superseded by Tessl Review.
This page explains what changed, the impact on how skill quality is scored, and how to switch.
tessl skill review has been removed. Running it now fails with a message pointing here. Use tessl review run instead. The mapping below covers every flag, including the one flag that has no replacement yet.
What changed, and why
Tessl Review brings skill review into Tessl's wider agentic evaluation architecture.
Tessl Skill Review evaluated individual SKILL.md files in a single pass against a fixed rubric. With Tessl Review, the review runs through an agent that works across the whole skill and its connected files, and reasons over multiple steps to reach its result.
This allows us to introduce several improvements:
- Full-bundle review. The review reads your entire skill, not just
SKILL.md. References, scripts, and assets are all in scope, so nothing in your skill is missed. - Customisable rubric. Fork the default quality scoring rubric and define what "good" means for your organisation. Set it as your workspace default and every review uses your standard.
- Review history. Reviews are stored and queryable with
tessl review listandtessl review view, so you have a persistent record of quality over time. - Built for CI.
--jsonand--thresholdgate pull requests on a review score, exactly as before.
Scores returned by Tessl Review may differ slightly from skill review. Because the review now runs as an agent over your full skill bundle rather than a single pass, Tessl Review scores are more accurate and more reflective of real skill quality. And because the agent reasons over multiple steps, it can reach a clearer, better-founded conclusion than skill review's single pass.
The shift to Tessl Review also makes it easier for us to expand what reviews can do. You can now run a security scan directly from the CLI with tessl review run security — see Protect against insecure skills. Coming soon:
- Choose the model a review runs on.
What changes on the CLI
Reviews require authentication. tessl review run requires you to be signed in. Sign in with tessl login, or set a TESSL_TOKEN API key in CI.
Most workflows map across directly:
What stays the same:
- The default rubric (Anthropic best practices) is unchanged. Reviews still score the same three components out of the box: validation, description, and content.
- Reviews still produce a 0-100 score.
--jsonwith--thresholdstill gates CI through the exit code.- The GitHub Action still drives reviews in CI.
What's new to know:
- Authentication.
tessl review runandtessl review fixrun against your workspace, so you need to be signed in (tessl login, or aTESSL_TOKENAPI key in CI) and run against a workspace (pass--workspace, or pick one when prompted). Any workspace member can run reviews. - Asynchronous by default. A review runs server-side.
tessl review runpolls until it finishes and then prints the score, so a single command still feels the same. Press Ctrl+C to detach and pick the run back up later withtessl review view --last.
Migrating your CI
Replace the tessl skill review step with tessl review run, add a workspace, and keep your threshold:
--workspace is required when --json is set, because a non-interactive run cannot prompt for one. In CI, authenticate with a TESSL_TOKEN repository secret. For a complete GitHub Actions workflow, see Review, lint & publish with GitHub Actions.
Next steps
- Check a skill's quality using review - the full guide to running reviews, customising the rubric, and gating CI
tessl review runreference - all flags- Review, lint & publish with GitHub Actions - run reviews on pull requests