skill
betterbest
You've already got good. A Claude Code skill for making anything as good as it can be through iterative experiments.
Set up
Skills are installed by placing their folder where your agent loads skills.
The download comes from github.com/drewmccormack/betterbest itself, not from our server, so what you get is exactly what its author published.
Install instructions come from the README
README
synced Oct 26, 2026betterbest
You've got good. Go for best. Polish and improve just about anything, from code to prose.
A Claude Code skill for making an existing thing as good as it can be through iterative experiments — a prompt, a config, a function, an agent system, an essay, a recipe, a policy doc, a design. Anything you can inspect, change, and measure.
It's a general-purpose adaptation of LLM-driven autoresearch: you improve a thing by running one experiment at a time. Change one thing, run a probe, read the result against a rubric, keep it if better or revert if not. Repeat until the thing is as good as it can be. The judging is always the model reading the outputs against the rubric — never a regex.
The skill only refines what already exists; it doesn't generate from nothing. You bring the good.
What's in the loop
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
| Artefact | the thing you're improving (inspectable, mutable, versionable) |
| Probe | whatever exercises the artefact and yields something to read (test questions at a prompt, a critic-persona panel for prose, tests+profile for code) |
| Rubric | the weighted dimensions you read each result against — each tagged a hard gate or a soft penalty |
| Journal | the running record of every experiment and verdict |
Plus the disciplines that make it hold up over a long run: judge by reading (never regex), a
canary that catches stale-variant runs, a fresh-subagent critique of the judge to fight drift,
a co-evolving rubric, and a sealed holdout test run once at the end. See SKILL.md for the full method.
Install
As a plugin (recommended): in Claude Code, add the marketplace and install:
/plugin marketplace add drewmccormack/betterbest
/plugin install betterbest@betterbest
Or as a plain skill: clone into your Claude Code skills directory:
git clone https://github.com/drewmccormack/betterbest.git ~/.claude/skills/betterbest
Either way, Claude Code discovers it automatically. Then just ask Claude to "make X better",
"improve this", or "iterate on this until it's good", and the skill activates — or invoke it
directly with /betterbest.
Helper scripts
The scripts in scripts/ do the mechanical work and none of the judging:
journal.py— track best-so-far, plateau length, costprobe_runner.py— run your probe, capture outputs per iterationjudge_helper.py— render a read-and-fill scoring worksheet (it assigns no scores)canary.py— verify the probe actually ran the variant you think it did
Run any with --help.
Provenance
This skill was built with test-driven development for skills, then improved by running its own loop on itself across five rounds — each round surfaced a real flaw (a code-vs-prose bias, a self-referential acceptance bar, a routing bug, a coarse scoring signal) that the previous round couldn't see. The skill is, in a small way, its own best demonstration.