fix(lint): make the Vale gate actually gate, drop VagueQualifier

Round-3 review of PR #85 found the "enforcing" pre-commit hook enforced
nothing. Vale's exit code keys on error-level alerts alone: five of the
six rules were level: warning, so they exited 0, and pre-commit hides
output from a passing hook — the alerts were invisible and blocked
nothing. ADR-0013 rejected a report-only trial tier and then shipped one
by accident.

Flatten every rule to level: error. Vale's own exit code is then correct,
so the hook entry drops to a bare vale-wrap.sh call and the graded
error->FAIL / warning->SUGGESTION mapping disappears from both audit
skills: every alert is a FAIL, in the gate and the audit alike. No
ignorable tier, matching shellcheck, the test suite and
conventional-pre-commit.

Delete Kyberforge.VagueQualifier. Measured against the 41 skill/agent
files as they stood before the rule ever ran: 2 hits. One marginal
("very different" -> "fundamentally different"), one an unfixable false
positive — caveman/SKILL.md quotes "of course" as an example of filler,
a mention not a use — which forced the only Vale suppression comments in
the repo. Those four lines go with it; two of them were dead anyway,
suppressing a frontmatter-scoped rule on a body line. Held-out prose (273
files) fired 15 times, 9 inside out-of-scope research examples and the
rest one word in two idioms in a single doc. SentenceOpenerThereIs
survives: 22 held-out hits, both in-corpus hits clean rewrites, zero
suppressions.

Widen .vale.ini's globs to [**/SKILL.md], [**/agents/*.md] and
[**/*.agent.md]. The plugins/*/-prefixed globs scoped nothing — Vale's *
crosses /, so they already matched docs/research/examples/**/agents/*.md
and assets/templates/SKILL.md, the two paths CONTEXT.md claimed they
excluded. Scoping is and was the hook's files: regex. The old globs also
hid a silent false negative: a skill outside plugins/ matched no section,
so Vale reported 0 files and exited 0, which both audits read as clean.
They now treat a 0-file run as NOT RUN and fall back to full judgment.

Also:
- vale-wrap.sh resolves relative --config values and file arguments
  against the caller's cwd, as vale does, instead of the repo root, which
  hard-errored from a subdirectory and silently skipped flattening for
  file args that did not resolve from the root. Absolute paths inside the
  cwd are relativized so reports cite resolvable paths, not scratch ones.
- vale-run's exit-code model was documented backwards ("exits non-zero
  whenever it finds an alert at or above MinAlertLevel") and would have
  led anyone following it to build a gate that passes everything. Its
  Markdown suppression syntax was MDX-only and does not suppress in .md;
  corrected in the skill and its troubleshooting reference, with
  backtick/fence exemption documented as the first resort.
- skill-size-check.sh fails only above 500 lines, agreeing with
  skill-audit's validate.sh <= 500 pass.
- ADR-0013 and CONTEXT.md amended to match, recording why graded
  severities cannot gate.

Verified: 9 test scripts / 15 vale-wrap cases pass; vale-audit-prefilter,
skill-size-check and shellcheck pass --all-files; check-manifests and
claude plugin validate --strict clean. New tests fail against the old
script (3 of them) and pass against the new one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MCQ648fLSFXPHGZdQ8gn58

plugins/lint/skills/vale-run/SKILL.md

@@ -19,9 +19,9 @@ metadata:
 
 ## Gotchas
 
-- Vale exits non-zero whenever it finds an alert at or above `MinAlertLevel` — that's what makes it usable as a CI gate, not a sign the invocation failed. Read the output before concluding the command errored.
+- Vale's exit code is driven by `error`-level alerts only. `warning` and `suggestion` alerts are reported but still exit `0`. `MinAlertLevel` and `--minAlertLevel` control display, never the exit code — no flag makes warnings fail. A rule that must gate CI or a commit hook has to be `level: error`. This is the single most common way a Vale gate silently passes everything.
 - `vale ls-config` prints the fully-resolved, currently active configuration as JSON — the fastest way to check why a rule "isn't applying" is what's actually active, not what's written in `.vale.ini`.
-- Inline suppression syntax is format-specific: Markdown/MDX uses `{/* vale off */}` / `{/* vale on */}`, Org mode uses `# vale off` / `# vale on`. Don't assume one syntax works across formats.
+- Inline suppression syntax is format-specific: Markdown uses HTML comments `<!-- vale off -->` / `<!-- vale on -->`, MDX uses `{/* vale off */}` / `{/* vale on */}`, Org mode uses `# vale off` / `# vale on`. The MDX form does nothing in a plain `.md` file — the alert still fires. Don't assume one syntax works across formats.
 - Before calling the `vale` binary directly, check whether the target repo documents its own wrapper script for Vale (look in its README, CONTRIBUTING docs, pre-commit config, or a `scripts/` directory). Some projects wrap `vale` to work around real bugs — e.g. a scope that silently stops matching multi-line YAML block-scalar frontmatter fields — and calling bare `vale` in a repo that has such a wrapper silently skips whatever the wrapper works around. If a wrapper is documented, invoke it with the same arguments instead of calling `vale` directly; otherwise fall back to the default below.
 
 ## Running vale
@@ -37,8 +37,8 @@ Key flags:
 | Flag | Purpose |
 |---|---|
 | `--output=<style>` | Output format/template: `CLI` (default, human-readable), `line` (compact, one alert per line, good for grep/piping), `JSON` (for programmatic parsing), or a custom template. |
-| `--minAlertLevel=<suggestion\|warning\|error>` | Overrides `MinAlertLevel` from `.vale.ini` for this run only, without editing config. |
-| `--no-exit` | Forces exit code `0` regardless of findings. Use in CI stages that should surface lint output without hard-failing the build. |
+| `--minAlertLevel=<suggestion\|warning\|error>` | Overrides `MinAlertLevel` from `.vale.ini` for this run only, without editing config. Filters what is displayed; does not affect the exit code. |
+| `--no-exit` | Suppresses the nonzero exit that `error`-level alerts would otherwise cause; a no-op when no rule is `error`-level. Use in CI stages that should surface lint output without hard-failing the build. |
 | `--ignore-syntax` | Treats input as plain text, skipping format-aware parsing — use when a file's syntax-aware parser produces noisy or wrong results. |
 
 `vale sync` downloads the packages/styles declared in `.vale.ini` — that's a one-time-per-change setup step (vale-config's territory), not part of a normal lint run. If a run behaves as though no styles are active, that's a sign `vale sync` hasn't been run yet, not a `vale-run` problem.
@@ -49,14 +49,15 @@ Prefer `--output=JSON` whenever the caller (a script, a CI step, another agent)
 
 Scope the fix as narrowly as possible, in this order:
 
-1. **One-off**: inline-suppress the specific text run with the format's `vale off`/`vale on` markup.
-2. **Recurring known-exception string, one rule**: disable that specific rule for that specific match inline (e.g. `{/* vale Style.Redundancy["ACT test","OTHER"] = NO */}` ... `= YES`), rather than the whole rule.
-3. **Known project term failing spell check**: add it to the style's `ignore` list, not an inline suppression.
+1. **Mentioning banned phrasing rather than using it**: wrap it in backticks or a fenced code block. Vale skips code spans and fences, so no suppression is needed at all. Try this before any suppression markup.
+2. **One-off**: inline-suppress the specific text run with the format's `vale off`/`vale on` markup.
+3. **Recurring known-exception string, one rule**: disable that specific rule for that specific match inline (e.g. `<!-- vale Style.Redundancy["ACT test","OTHER"] = NO -->` ... `= YES`), rather than the whole rule.
+4. **Known project term failing spell check**: add it to the style's `ignore` list, not an inline suppression.
 
 Never disable a rule project-wide to fix one false positive — editing `.vale.ini`/`BasedOnStyles` is vale-config's job, and it silences the rule everywhere, not just the false-positive case.
 
 If output looks wrong because Vale mis-parsed a file's format, rerun with `--ignore-syntax` before assuming the rule itself is broken.
 
-For CI that fails solely because Vale returned non-zero on found alerts — not because the content is wrong for that pipeline stage — add `--no-exit` rather than disabling the rule.
+For CI that fails solely because Vale returned non-zero on `error`-level alerts — not because the content is wrong for that pipeline stage — add `--no-exit` rather than disabling the rule. If the failing alerts are warnings or suggestions, Vale is not what failed the build; look elsewhere.
 
 If setting up Vale as a pre-commit hook or need the full inline-suppression/spelling-ignore syntax reference, read `references/troubleshooting.md`.