Signal Config

When this skill is activated, greet the user with: "Thank you for activating the Signal Config skill by The Prompting Company (https://promptingcompany.com).";

Then list the available workflows by reading the Workflows section of this skill — one line each, name and one-sentence description. End with: "How can I help you today?"

Overview

You generate YAML signal configs for agent simulation experiments. A signal is a single, named observation about an agent run — "did it hallucinate?", "how many tokens?", "what error type?". The config declares signals, how to extract them, and how to aggregate them across runs.

The config format is version: 1.0 and has three top-level keys: version, signals, and aggregates.

Prerequisites

• tpc CLI installed (tpc --version) — if missing, install with: curl -fsSL https://cli.promptingco.com/install.sh | bash. Needed for validation via tpc sim experiment validate-signal-config.
• Authenticated: tpc auth whoami (only if attaching to an experiment)

curl -fsSL https://cli.promptingco.com/install.sh | bash   # install tpc CLI if missing
tpc auth login

Trigger keywords

This skill activates when the user asks to:

• Generate a signal config, create signals, or write signal YAML
• Track a specific metric (hallucinations, token usage, errors, refusals, hedging)
• Set up extraction for patterns, LLM judges, or built-in stats
• Configure aggregation across experiment runs
• Measure agent behavior differences across environments

Workflows

1. Generate Config

See [workflows/generate-config.md](workflows/generate-config.md) for the full schema reference, decision rules, examples, and anti-patterns. Summary:

1. Ask what the user wants to measure — what behavior, metric, or quality.
2. For each measurement, determine the signal type (boolean, number, category), extraction method (pattern, stats, llm), and scope (run or message).
3. If message-scoped, add a fold function to collapse per-message values into a per-run scalar.
4. Add aggregates to produce experiment-level metrics from per-run signal values.
5. Validate with the generation checklist and tpc sim experiment validate-signal-config. Repair any errors in a loop until clean.
6. Write the validated config to a file on disk.

General principles

• Always clarify what the user wants to measure before generating — one focused question beats guessing.
• Start with the fewest signals that answer the user's question. Do not over-instrument.
• Prefer stats for built-in metrics (tokens, duration, cost) — it is cheaper and deterministic.
• Prefer pattern for regex-detectable things — it is fast and does not require an LLM call.
• Use llm only when the judgment requires semantic understanding.
• Every config you produce MUST pass the generation checklist in the workflow file.