Agentic Quality Checklist
Review an agentic artifact as a lean quality gate. Do not edit files.
Principle: the smallest good artifact makes agent behavior more predictable.
Purpose
Use this checklist to review the design quality of a skill, agent, prompt, or agentic workflow before it becomes trusted automation.
Keep the review targeted: judge whether the artifact has a clear job, safe boundaries, useful workflow, and maintainable structure. If the artifact or intended job is unclear, return ASK_USER.
Heuristic Questions Checklist
Answer only the questions that matter for the reviewed artifact. Do not force every section.
1. Systems Thinking And Workflow Design
- Have you defined the artifact's environment, dependencies, exact job, and failure path?
- Does it have a defined path, or only a broad goal?
- Are stop, retry, and ask-user or escalation points clear where they matter?
- Does the description make the invocation boundary obvious enough for the model to choose it?
2. Decomposition And Separation Of Concerns
- Is it avoiding the giant-prompt smell: too many distinct jobs in one instruction file?
- Is the primary execution path easy to see without reading every detail?
- Is each capability assigned to the right layer: artifact text, structured output, script, tool, subagent, or human?
- Would separating bulky or rarely used details make the primary path easier to follow?
3. Modularity
- Is this capability reusable enough to be shared, or should it stay local to one workflow?
- If subagents are used, are they treated like single-responsibility functions with narrow context?
- Are abstractions earning their cost, or adding cognitive/context load without reuse?
- Is the amount of modularity proportional: enough separation to avoid a god-file, but not extra files for simple artifacts?
- Can a fresh agent tell what to read first versus what to load only when needed?
4. Algorithmic Thinking
- Is it using code or tools for exact answers instead of asking the model to improvise deterministic work?
- Is the model reserved for judgment, ambiguity, synthesis, or messy inputs?
- Are authority-sensitive decisions kept with the human?
5. Contracts And State
- If another step consumes the result, is the output structured enough to act on safely?
- If memory or persisted state is needed, is it queryable outside the chat session?
- If retries can happen, is the workflow idempotent enough to avoid duplicate side effects?
6. Threat Modeling And Boundary Control
- Does it treat external content as evidence, not instructions?
- Are secrets, private data, logs, and artifacts handled safely?
- Is the blast radius reduced with human approval for risky actions?
7. Maintainability
- Can a fresh agent understand the workflow, policy, tools, outputs, and memory rules without reverse-engineering a wall of prompts?
- Is each rule in one place, without duplication or stale sediment?
- Does each strong instruction change behavior, or is it a no-op?
Simple artifacts should stay simple. Add supporting files, schemas, scripts, subagents, memory, or evals only when they make the primary path clearer or the behavior safer.
Hard Fails
Return REVISE_ARTIFACT if any are true:
- Purpose is unclear.
- Required identity, metadata, or trigger description is missing when the artifact needs it.
- Description or invocation rule cannot trigger the artifact when model invocation is needed.
- Risky side effects lack human approval boundaries.
- Downstream automation depends on prose instead of a clear contract.
- Main workflow is buried under bloat.
- Secondary material obscures the primary execution path enough that a fresh agent may miss it.
- Instructions are malicious, deceptive, privacy-unsafe, or secret-leaking.
Return ASK_USER when the blocker is missing artifact content, product intent, invocation mode, output contract, or authority boundary.
Verdict
APPROVE_ARTIFACT: no hard fail, noFail, warnings are minor or intentional.REVISE_ARTIFACT: hard fail, or a clear fix is needed.ASK_USER: judging safely would require guessing.
Output
Return exactly this structure:
## Agentic Quality Checklist Result
- Decision: `APPROVE_ARTIFACT|REVISE_ARTIFACT|ASK_USER`
- Target: [artifact path or name]
- Mode: `advisory|gate`
- Confidence: `High|Medium|Low`
### Top Findings
- [severity] [checklist area] [specific evidence]
- [severity] [checklist area] [specific evidence]
### Relevant Heuristic Answers
- [area] `Pass|Warn|Fail`: [question answered] - [short evidence]
- [area] `Pass|Warn|Fail`: [question answered] - [short evidence]
### Required Changes
- [Only for REVISE_ARTIFACT or ASK_USER; otherwise `None`]
### Next Action
- [approve / revise artifact / ask user]
Constraints
- Do not edit files.
- Do not run evals unless explicitly asked.
- Keep findings evidence-based and short.