NVIDIA introduced nel-assistant, a "skill" for agents that turns the setup and execution of LLM evaluations into a practical conversation. Have you ever been frustrated building 200+ line YAML files just to run a single evaluation? This is for you: describe what you want and the agent generates, validates, and runs the right configuration.
What nel-assistant is and why it matters
nel-assistant is a skill built on the NVIDIA NeMo Evaluator library that lets agents (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex and other agentic IDEs) configure, run, and monitor LLM evaluations without you writing YAML by hand.
In practice this means: instead of wrestling with scattered parameters across docs and model cards, the agent asks a few questions, reads the model card, computes hardware tweaks, and generates a structured, validated YAML ready for production.
How it works (technical, but clear)
The typical flow is conversational. The agent starts with five key questions (execution environment, deployment backend, export target, model type, and benchmark category). With those answers it runs a command like:
