ML — approach, data, evals, LLM craft, traps

Rule content lives in the five files below; this SKILL.md only routes (doctrine/04-maintenance.md governs edits to this bundle too).

Route by moment

| You are about to… | Read (in this folder) | |---|---| | Decide whether ML/an LLM is warranted, and which method rung to use | approach.md | | Touch a dataset, labels, or splits; suspect a score is too good | data.md | | Define success, build/judge an eval, or assess someone's metric claim | evals.md | | Build with LLMs: prompts, RAG, structured output, agents, model choice | llm.md | | Diagnose an underperforming model or LLM feature | data.md §1 first (read real failures), then llm.md §3 if RAG, traps.md to name the pattern | | Review an ML project's health; name why a claim or pipeline smells wrong | traps.md |

A new ML feature usually runs approach.md (interrogate + pick the rung) → evals.md §1 (eval BEFORE build) → data.md → then llm.md if the rung is LLM-shaped → skim traps.md §C before finalizing any launch or monitoring plan.

Scope and neighbors

Modeling and evaluation judgment. The serving infrastructure around a model is ordinary backend (backend bundle: APIs, queues, operate.md); experiment execution discipline is methods (investigate/verify); whether to delegate → doctrine.

The stance

The eval is the spec; anything unmeasured is folklore. Look at the data with your own eyes (data.md §1), climb the method ladder from the cheapest rung (approach.md §3), and treat every surprising score as leakage until disproven (data.md §2). The failure mode of this field is not bad models — it is unearned confidence in numbers.