AEVAL: From Anecdotal to Deterministic Testing for Agentic Skill Workflows

Abstract:Modern agentic systems increasingly rely on skills: installable packages of natural language and code that teach an LLM agent to perform a domain task. As skill repositories grow, developers need automated quality signals on every change, yet evaluation today is largely anecdotal: a developer asks an agent to "try the skill," watches a demo, and forms a subjective impression. This yields neither reproducibility across runs nor comparability across versions, and scales poorly to marketplaces where one regression can silently break dozens of downstream workflows. We present AEVAL (Agentic Evaluation), a CI-integrated framework that replaces this practice with a deterministic, reproducible test pipeline for agentic skills. Every skill change triggers a test event: the skill runs against a developer-declared evaluation contract (this http URL) inside an automated executor, emitting a structured, evidence-grounded quality signal that downstream CI can route on. A key ingredient is a structural separation between executor and grader, preventing a subtle but pervasive failure mode: an agent that silently self-corrects during execution and then grades its own patched outputs as passing. Our contributions are: (i) a deterministic, change-triggered evaluation protocol with per-skill contracts and per-run artifact schemas; (ii) a formalization of self-correction bias as a distinct failure mode of naive agentic evaluators; (iii) an executor/grader separation with a first-attempt grading rule and explicit self-correction tracking; and (iv) a tiered, grounded-evidence fix-suggestion scheme (LV1 causal, LV2 quality) posted as inline merge-request comments. Validated on real skills in a production agentic stack across multiple agent SDKs, AEVAL converts spurious 100% pass rates into reproducible first-attempt fail signals with an auditable record of every executor fix.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Performance (cs.PF)

arXiv:2607.16345 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2607.16345v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.16345 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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