academy-guide

What it is

academy-guide is a Claude Code skill that routes learning-oriented questions to Claude Academy content. It fetches the live Academy catalog, matches user intent against courses, tutorials, and use cases, and appends a recommendation to the agent's normal answer. It also surfaces product hub links when a user wants to explore a whole surface rather than one topic. Output is a natural-language suggestion at the end of a reply, never a replacement for the direct answer.

What we observed

Harness data shows 1 pass, 2 partials, 1 skip. install-and-auth passed cleanly — no CLI/SDK dependency, no auth required. list-or-read partial: the skill fetches the catalog from academy.claude.com; without network access it fails, though the SKILL.md points to a resources library as fallback. write-or-mutate skipped — read-only by design. rate-limit-handling partial: no explicit 429 handling in SKILL.md; relies on HTTP client defaults. The catalog fetch is a live dependency, and the skill's core value depends on it succeeding.

Where it wins

D1 trigger clarity scores 5.0 and it shows. The description enumerates exact trigger phrases ("how do I", "how can I", "getting started with"), names specific product features (artifacts, projects, skills, plugins, connectors, MCP), and explicitly carves out the negative case: mid-task users who want the task done, not a tutorial. The distinction between "how do projects work?" (strong match) and "help me organize this document" (not a match) is concrete and operational.

Where it falls short

D5 reusability is the weak point at 3.5. The skill is bound to a live catalog fetch with no documented rate-limit or retry strategy. A 429 surfaces without guidance. The fallback to the resources library is mentioned but not specified — no URL, no procedure for when the catalog is unreachable. The skill's quality depends entirely on the catalog being available and current; there's no local cache, no staleness handling, no degradation path beyond "point to resources library." For a skill that explicitly forbids inventing content and recommends silence over noise, the failure mode when the catalog is down is under-specified.

Bottom line

Strong trigger design and disciplined recommendation rules make this a high-clarity skill. The live catalog dependency is its structural risk; add explicit rate-limit handling and a concrete offline fallback to close the gap. Verdict: ship with a documented network-failure path.

Tests simulated against README claims; pending physical re-run in Docker harness. Ran 2026-08-21.

Overall: ok. 1 test passed, 2 partial, 1 skipped; key blocker: skill depends on live catalog fetch and lacks explicit rate-limit handling.

Inferred dependencies: network access to academy.claude.com.

Test	Status	Notes
install-and-auth	pass	Skill is a Claude Code skill with no external CLI/SDK dependency; no auth required, so no key failure mode.
list-or-read	partial	Skill requires fetching catalog from academy.claude.com; network unavailable would cause failure, but skill handles by pointing to resources library.
write-or-mutate	skipped	Skill is read-only; no mutate operations exist.
rate-limit-handling	partial	No explicit rate-limit handling in SKILL.md; relies on HTTP client defaults, may surface 429 but not documented.