Markdown source

Don't Ship Skills Without Evals

Conference Context

Session Description

There are thousands agent skills. Almost none of them are tested. They get vibe-checked with two manual runs, maybe a thumbs-up from a colleague, then shipped. You wouldn't merge code without tests — so why are we shipping skills without evals? This talk covers the full lifecycle of building reliable agent skills: what a skill actually is (and isn't), how to write one that triggers correctly, and how to build a lightweight eval harness that catches failures before your users do.

Media Evidence

Why (Senior) Engineers Struggle to Build AI Agents — Philipp Schmid, Google DeepMind (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).

Evidence Graph

This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

Media Signals

Agent Reading Notes

Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

Transcript Status

Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.

People

Supporting Slides

Slide Evidence

Synthesis

Synthesized Breakdown

Yes, so hi everyone. My name is Philip. I'm based out of Germany. I'm part of the Google DeepMind team mostly working on Gemini API and agents.

Speaker And Company Context

Topics Covered

Derived Links And Source Material

Novel Concepts / Clever Methods

Evidence Boundary

This synthesis uses the official schedule plus cached video transcripts. Official AI Engineer World's Fair San Francisco 2026 livestreams and cut videos are primary event video sources for transcript/slide evidence; external, historical, or speaker-matched videos remain supporting context unless manually verified as exact official event recordings.

Official YouTube Recording