Step 5: Test

Part of: AI Workflow Framework

Where You Are

You’ve just finished Build (Step 4). You have an installed skill (or agent), the Design Spec, and the Workflow Requirements — which holds the yes/no acceptance criteria, rules, human gates, and 3–5 realistic inputs you wrote in Deconstruct.

Your first run is a test, not a deployment.

Six rules for judging your workflow

Judge it against what you wrote in Deconstruct, not against how the output feels.
Use real inputs, including one hard case.
Run it in a fresh conversation. A run inside the conversation that built it sees everything you said while building and looks better than it will in real use.
Every criterion is met or it isn’t. One miss is a miss.
The AI grades first, with evidence. You make the call.
Test, fix, test again. Two to four rounds is normal. Don’t fix mid-test.

How the Skill Works

Load context — the requirements (criteria, rules, gates, inputs), the design spec, and where the built skill lives.
Confirm the passing rule — every line of the report card Met on every input; a miss on a (must) line always fails; any other miss is fixed or explicitly accepted.
Smoke run — the skill reads the built workflow against the requirements to catch obvious gaps before you spend a run.
Integration pre-flight — confirms each connector has the access it needs in the account that will run the workflow; a blocked write path is marked “not run”, never faked.
Run and grade each scenario — you run each input in a new chat and bring the output back; the skill fills in the report card with evidence; you confirm or override each line.
Diagnose every miss — each Not met line is mapped to the building block that caused it.
Verdict — Ready, Not ready (back to Build, which regenerates only what’s named), or Waiting on access.
Clean up test records — anything the test created in a live system is listed and offered for removal.

The Report Card

For each input you run, the skill produces one table. Every row is something you said the workflow must do, tagged with where it came from:

Expected	From	Result	Evidence
Every prospect row has contact info	AC1 (must)	Met	20 of 20 rows
Never includes previously contacted people	R3	Not met	2 rows already in the CRM export
Pauses before sending	G1	Met	Draft created, not sent

AC rows are your acceptance criteria, R rows your rules, G rows your human gates, and each step’s stated output gets a row too. The Evidence column is what makes the grade trustworthy: a count, a quoted phrase, a missing element — never “looks fine”.

Where you supplied a golden example (a real past output that was exactly right), the skill compares against it: what’s missing, what’s extra, what’s different in substance. A golden example is one good answer, not the only one — the question is “would you send this instead?” Keep at least one input without a golden example, so you learn whether the workflow generalizes.

After each input, one more question: how much would you have to edit this before using it — nothing, a little, or a lot? That answer is recorded, and its trend over time is the earliest sign of drift when you come back in Improve.

Where the Workflow Runs

Two conversations:

The Test conversation runs the test skill. It has your requirements and design. It grades.
A fresh conversation has only the installed skill and one input. It runs. In Claude, start a new chat and ask for the skill by name; in ChatGPT, a new chat with the skill invoked by name. If the workflow lives in a project with context files, the fresh chat is inside that project.

You paste or attach the output back into the Test conversation. This keeps the run honest and, because the skill must be installed for the fresh chat to work, it proves the installation at the same time.

Diagnose and Fix

What went wrong	What to change
Output is generic or off-brand	Add context — examples, style guide, reference material
A step was skipped or misunderstood	The orchestrator skill — make that step’s instruction explicit
A step needs expertise the AI doesn’t have	A component skill — build or extend one for that step
Output format is wrong	The orchestrator skill — add an explicit format example
The AI ignored a reference file	Context — check the file is where the skill expects it and is readable
A tool call failed	The connector — verify it independently, then re-run
The AI had to make decisions your rules didn’t cover	Design — the workflow may need an agent, or clearer rules

Every miss names its building block, so Build knows exactly what to regenerate. After a fix, re-run the failed inputs, then the full set — a fix in one place can affect another.

Readiness

Ready — every line met on every input, or a miss you looked at and accepted for a recorded reason. Move to Run.

Not ready — at least one miss you haven’t accepted. Back to Build, which regenerates only the building blocks named in your results, then return here.

Waiting on access — the logic passed but a connector’s write access isn’t authorized yet. Fix the access; no rebuild needed.

What This Produces

outputs/[name]/test-results.md — the report card per input, the diagnosis table, accepted misses, the verdict as a count (“11 of 12 lines met across 2 inputs”), and machine-readable frontmatter so Improve can later show you exactly which lines changed.

How to Use This

This step is facilitated by the test AI Workflow Framework skill. See Set Up the Skills for installation instructions across all supported platforms.

How to start: Say “run the test skill” (or “test the workflow”) — works on every platform. With the plugin installed, Claude Code also accepts /handsonai:test, and Cowork lists it when you type /.

Platform compatibility: Claude (Chat, Cowork, Code) ✓ | ChatGPT & Codex ✓ | Gemini (Spark, Enterprise, CLI) ✓ | M365 Copilot ✓ | Cursor / Antigravity ✓

Start with this prompt:

Test my workflow against the acceptance criteria in my Workflow Requirements.

Deconstruct Workflows — where the criteria, rules, gates, and inputs are captured
Build — where misses get fixed
Run — the next step once every line is met
Improve — where the same report card is re-run to catch drift