refactor(skills): retrofit the corpus to the ADR-0020 context contract (#129)

Retrofits all 39 skills to ADR-0020's description/body context contract, then fixes what six rounds of independent review found in that retrofit — including four ways the hot gate itself failed open.

Closes #99, #107, #108, #110, #111, #114, #115, #120.

## The retrofit (waves 1-5)

| | Start | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Description FAILs (>400 chars) | 26 | **0** |
| Body FAILs (>900 words, body-only) | 9 | **0** |
| Dangling routing targets | 2 | **0** |
| `Kyberforge.CompositionNote` | 10 | **0** |
| Preload tax | 21,005 chars | **~10,500** |

Under the 12,000-char success criterion. Per-wave detail is on #99.

## The review fixes

**The gate failed open four ways, three of them found after the retrofit shipped.** An unrecognised follower token made a dangling target vanish. A skill directory with no `SKILL.md` resolved as a valid target, so a commit could be green locally and red in a fresh clone — three existing fixtures were relying on that, one of which made the install-leak A/B pass vacuously. Then the free-standing `/name` sweep turned out to be gated on the sentence carrying a boundary marker, so route notation in any other sentence was invisible — not an ERROR, not a SUGGESTION, not an INFO — which left the documented "`/name` always blocks" promise false from a second direction. All four fixed and pinned.

**Two checks were silently not running.** `validate-provenance.sh` checks 7-8 were dead across nine skills. Waking them exposed a deeper problem: they assume `Research doc:` names a source index, but 30 of 121 entries point at topic content documents, so every new check-7 INFO was a false positive and check 8 was saved from a false-FAIL flood only by an *unannounced* skip. Checks 7/8 are now scoped to source indexes and every skip announces itself (#121).

**The retrofit's own anti-goal, four times.** ADR-0020 warns that a blunt gate gets satisfied by deleting content rather than relocating it. `diagnose` and `skill-audit` relocated prose and then read it unconditionally; `prototype` and `vale-config` deleted rules outright that survived nowhere. All four addressed.

## Verification

- `bash tests/run-tests.sh --strict` — 24 suites, 0 skipped, 0 failed
- `bash tests/run-bats.sh` — 325 tests, 0 failures
- `pre-commit run --all-files` — 17/17
- `pre-commit run --hook-stage pre-push --all-files` — 16/16, with `apm marketplace check` and `apm pack --check-clean` run against the remote, not skipped
- `scripts/skill-size-check.sh` over all 39 skills — rc 0, 0 ERROR/FAIL, SUGGESTION-only
- Preload tax measured at **10,498 chars**, max description 390 — both inside budget
- Every new test proven non-vacuous by a deliberate mutation of the behaviour it covers

**Per-commit sync, stated accurately:** the ten commits from the latest review round each pass `check-plugin-content-sync` in isolation, verified by checking each out in a detached worktree with a clean between. The earlier gitea window (`dfacf05..bedbd1d`, nine commits) does **not** — its mirror was regenerated in one batch at `bbc7300`. An earlier revision of this description claimed the property held for every commit; it does not, and a bisect through that window lands on a red commit. **Squash-merge** to collapse it, or accept that this range is not bisectable.

## Version bump

Six plugins and the catalog take a **patch**, not a minor. The branch is **89 commits — 40 `fix` / 30 `refactor` / 12 `docs` / 5 `chore` / 2 `test` — zero `feat`, zero `!`, zero `BREAKING CHANGE`** — and adds no skill, agent, command or hook. (Two earlier revisions of this section cited a stale histogram, most recently 78 commits; the figures above are measured at HEAD.) Both rules this repo ships (`forge/references/version-bump.md`, landing in this PR, and `git-commits/references/conventional-commits-spec.md`) make that a patch, and the catalog set is unchanged at 7 entries.

Not settled by that: four published files were removed from the installed tree, three moved, and `caveman` gained `disable-model-invocation`, retiring its old triggers. Under a strict reading those are major-class and currently ship under `refactor:` with no marker. Whether the deployed skill surface is a public contract is written down nowhere — worth deciding, but it outlives this PR.

## Deliberately not in scope

#112 (cherry-pick ownership, now resolved in favour of `git-commits`), #113 (`rtk git` normalisation), #116 (research fan-out), #101 (audit-skill merge), #122 (non-spec skill-root files), #123 (no PRD producer) stay open. #117 is the one worth reading: the contract's remedy is to move prose into `references/`, which is exactly where neither the size gate nor Vale looks — and the blind spot is wider than #117 currently records, since there is no root `.vale.ini` at all, so every ADR, `CONTEXT.md` and `README.md` is unlinted too.

That blind spot let this branch carry two `level: error` `Kyberforge.SentenceOpenerThereIs` violations into `references/` files it created — `provider-adapter-author/references/provider-matrix.md:31` and `agent-audit/references/finding-criteria.md:95`. Both are reworded in `afadaae`, confirmed by routing each file through the audit's own `vale-wrap.sh` (1 error each before, 0 after). Five further occurrences sit in `references/` files already on `main`; those are the pre-existing corpus and stay with #117, which is the real fix.

Also unfixed and not this PR's: `apm install` appends a duplicate `SessionStart` entry to `.claude/settings.json`, so a fresh clone cannot get pre-push green without an edit AGENTS.md warns against. Reproduces identically on `main`.

Co-authored-by: Defame1297 <gitea@rkdr.net>
Reviewed-on: https://git.dev.rkdr.net/Defame1297/holocron/pulls/129
Co-authored-by: Claude Code AI - Gitea MCP <claude@noreply.git.dev.rkdr.net>
Co-committed-by: Claude Code AI - Gitea MCP <claude@noreply.git.dev.rkdr.net>

plugins/kyberforge/skills/skill-author/references/contract.md

@@ -47,15 +47,22 @@ explicitly" only where the user's natural phrasing genuinely omits the domain wo
 for `git-commits`, where the user says "commit". Adding one everywhere is what inflated this
 corpus, and it was deleted as a blanket rule.
 
-**Boundary targets must resolve.** Both forms are checked — the arrow and the prose form ("do not
-use for X, use `y` instead") — so a typo dangles either way. Targets resolve against a universe
-built by walking up **from the SKILL.md itself**: the nearest ancestor holding
+**Boundary targets must resolve, and the notation decides how hard the gate bites.** Route
+notation — `/name`, or any arrow form (`-> name`, `` -> `name` ``) — is checked
+unconditionally: an unresolved target there is a blocking ERROR. The prose form ("do not use
+for X, use `y` instead") is only a SUGGESTION by default, because a bare hyphenated word in a
+boundary clause is as likely to be a tool, a file format or an English compound as a route. It
+is promoted to a blocking ERROR only when a second target in the same sentence *does* resolve,
+which corroborates that the name was meant as a route. So a typo does **not** dangle equally
+either way — write the arrow when you want the target checked. Targets resolve against a universe built by walking up **from the SKILL.md
+itself**: the nearest ancestor holding
 `plugins/*/.apm/{skills,agents}` (or, failing that, the nearest ancestor holding `.git`) contributes
 every skill and agent under `<root>/plugins/*/`, plus the skill's own apm package and the packages
 that package declares in `apm.yml` under `dependencies.apm`. A sibling plugin in the same monorepo
 therefore resolves; a skill in an unrelated repo does not. A boundary clause naming a target
-outside that universe sends the router nowhere and fails the audit. Check the target exists before
-writing it — do not invent a plausible sibling name.
+outside that universe sends the router nowhere — a blocking failure in arrow or `/name` form, and
+in prose form a SUGGESTION nobody is forced to act on, which is the worse outcome because it ships.
+Check the target exists before writing it — do not invent a plausible sibling name.
 
 That universe is the apm marketplace and stops there. A **host built-in is not a routing target**:
 `/compact`, `/clear` and `/init` are Claude Code slash commands with no counterpart in Copilot CLI
@@ -63,6 +70,18 @@ or Codex, and `.apm/` source compiles for all three, so routing to one is a port
 gate is right to fail it and there is no allowlist. If a built-in genuinely needs mentioning, write
 it un-slashed — ``the `compact` built-in`` — which makes no routing claim and is not checked.
 
+**One arrow, one target.** The resolver reads only the first name after an arrow, so a second is
+checked by nothing and the gate emits a SUGGESTION naming both. Split instead of conjoining:
+`Not <thing> -> first-skill. Not <other thing> -> second-skill.`, never
+`Not <thing> -> first-skill or second-skill`.
+
+**Never let a hyphenated routing target wrap across lines in a folded `>` scalar.** YAML folding
+replaces the newline with a space, so `gitea-labels-` at the end of one line and `milestones` at
+the start of the next fold into `gitea-labels- milestones`. The gate then reads the target as
+`gitea-labels`, finds no such skill, and reports it dangling — this is what broke
+`gitea-labels-milestones`, and nothing in the source lines looks wrong. Reflow so the whole name
+sits on one line. The same applies to any backticked skill or agent name anywhere in a description.
+
 **Length.** 250 characters SUGGESTION, 400 characters FAIL, counting the frontmatter value only
 with YAML folding resolved. The agentskills.io 1,024-character spec limit is unchanged and sits
 above both. The SUGGESTION tier is the one that moves the average; treat 250 as the target and 400
@@ -118,11 +137,25 @@ If <condition>, read `references/<file>.md`.
 
 A generic pointer ("see references/ for details") is a Vale error — the agent cannot act on it.
 
+**A dispatch table is the wiring.** Where the body dispatches, a row already pairs a condition with
+a target, which is what the literal form encodes — so do not restate each row underneath as a prose
+conditional. That duplicates the routing in the one body whose whole purpose is to be short. The
+literal form is what a reference loaded *without* a table needs: a mid-procedure deepening, an
+escape hatch, an error path. A table earns this on four properties — every flow has a row and every
+row's target exists on disk; each row pairs exactly one target with a condition the agent can
+evaluate from the request, never a literal slash invocation; one line after the table names the
+matched file as the only one to read; and the gates every branch needs sit in the body, not inside
+one flow's file. That last one is the property the `git-commits` v0.1.2 failure turned on, and it is
+the one a dispatch split is most likely to break. `skill-audit`'s `references/body-discipline.md`
+carries the audit-side form of the same exemption; the two lists are the same four properties, and
+an edit to either belongs in both.
+
 **Dispatch is mandatory at two or more mutually exclusive flows.** The body carries the dispatch
 table and the gates common to every branch; each flow gets its own self-contained `references/`
-file. Exemplar: the `apm-workflow` skill — a **421-word body** dispatching to 3,006 words of
-references. Calibrate against 421: that file's whole-file count is 554 words, and aiming at that
-number instead overshoots the body budget by ~30%.
+file. Exemplar: the `apm-workflow` skill — a **294-word body** dispatching to 3,154 words of
+references across five flow files. Calibrate against 294: that file's whole-file count is 348
+words, and aiming at that number instead overshoots the body budget by ~18%. The 3,154 excludes
+`references/sources.md`, which is a provenance record and is never loaded at runtime.
 
 **Length.** 600 words SUGGESTION, 900 words FAIL, counting the **body only** — everything after
 the frontmatter's closing `---`.
@@ -130,10 +163,20 @@ the frontmatter's closing `---`.
 ## Gotchas section
 
 - Each entry must state a fact that **contradicts a reasonable default** — something the agent
-  gets wrong by acting sensibly. "Never commit secrets" is not one; the agent already knows.
+  gets wrong by acting sensibly. "Write a descriptive commit message" is not one; the agent does it
+  unprompted and nothing in the environment argues against it. A safety gate is a different case,
+  even where the agent knows the rule — see the paraphrase bullet below.
 - More than five entries is a SUGGESTION — five is the guideline, not a ceiling.
-- A Gotcha that paraphrases a step in the body below it is a **FAIL**. If the rule is already a
-  step, it is not a gotcha.
+- A Gotcha that paraphrases a step in the body below it is a **FAIL**, but deleting it is correct
+  only when the surviving copy is **reachable from every branch that reaches the Gotcha**. In a
+  dispatch body it often is not: each flow file loads alone, so a step in one is invisible to an
+  invocation that took another branch. Where the restated rule is a safety gate more than one flow
+  needs, move it into the body's common-gates section instead of dropping it. `git-commits` v0.1.2
+  is the worked failure: the retrofit deleted its always-loaded "never commit secrets" Gotcha in
+  favour of a step in one flow file, and left the history-rewrite branch — which stages and
+  `--amend`s, committing new content exactly as a fresh commit does — with no such check anywhere
+  in its loaded context, against this repo's governance hard prohibitions. v0.1.3 carries the rule
+  as a gate on every flow.
 - A Gotchas section exceeding 25% of the body is a SUGGESTION.
 - Place the section near the top — a gotcha read after the mistake is worthless.
 

plugins/kyberforge/skills/skill-author/references/retrofit.md

@@ -96,6 +96,13 @@ them for you. After every retrofit that adds, removes or renames a file:
       content moved into it, and remove any file the retrofit deleted. This is the one that gets
       missed: `sources.md` keeps citing sections of `SKILL.md` that no longer exist, the
       provenance check still exits 0, and the stale claim survives review.
+- [ ] **Reachability of every relocated gate.** For each Gotcha or gate the retrofit moved out of
+      the body, list the flows that need it and confirm each one reaches the surviving copy. A gate
+      that lands in a single flow file is invisible to every other branch, and no gate detects
+      that: `/skill-audit` reads whichever file it was handed, and the word counts improve either
+      way. Where more than one flow needs it, the copy belongs in the body's common-gates section,
+      not in a flow file. Grep the skill for the gate's key term and check every branch that hits
+      zero.
 - [ ] Re-run `/skill-audit` and confirm its `### Provenance` dimension does not report the new
       file as missing `source_keys`.
 
@@ -115,14 +122,19 @@ milestone), that's gitea-labels-milestones directly. Do not use for pull request
 or for local git branch/commit work (use gitea-branches or git-branches).
 ```
 
-After, 240 characters:
+After, the 290 characters that shipped:
 
 ```text
-Use when reading or writing Gitea issues — list, read, create, comment on, label, close, or
-search — even when the user does not say "Gitea". Not pull requests -> `gitea-prs`. Not label or
-milestone definitions -> `gitea-labels-milestones`.
+Use when reading or writing Gitea issues — "create an issue", "what issues are open", "close
+issue #N", "comment on issue #N", "search issues for X" — even when the user does not say
+"Gitea". Not pull requests -> `gitea-prs`. Not label or milestone definitions ->
+`gitea-labels-milestones`.
 ```
 
+The retrofit kept the quoted-phrasing register and dropped the verb list, not the other way round.
+Either register is admissible — what is banned is carrying both. Choose whichever routes better
+for the skill in hand; here the quoted user phrasings do, because they are how people actually ask.
+
 What came out, and why:
 
 | Removed | Why |
@@ -132,7 +144,7 @@ What came out, and why:
 | `Composes gitea-labels-milestones for all label inference/resolution and milestone lookup` | A composition note. It changes no routing decision and belongs in `README.md`. |
 | The parenthetical `(create/edit/delete a label, create/close a milestone)` | Capability enumeration inside a boundary clause. The boundary needs the target, not its feature list. |
 | The `gitea-branches` / `git-branches` boundary | Dropped entirely. Neither was ever going to win an issue request, so the clause defended against nothing — an invented boundary costs characters and buys no routing accuracy. |
-| `Do not use for pull requests (use gitea-prs)` prose form | Kept, but rewritten as `Not pull requests -> \`gitea-prs\`.` The rewrite buys characters and one uniform shape for the router — not safety. Both forms are parsed **and** target-checked, so a typo in the prose form dangles exactly as an arrow typo does. |
+| `Do not use for pull requests (use gitea-prs)` prose form | Kept, but rewritten as `Not pull requests -> \`gitea-prs\`.` The rewrite buys characters, one uniform shape for the router, **and** a stricter check: an unresolved arrow target is a blocking ERROR, while an unresolved prose target is only a SUGGESTION unless another target in the same sentence resolves. The prose form does not dangle as loudly. |
 
 What stayed: one trigger clause, one capability clause, the indirect trigger (genuinely warranted
 here — people say "create an issue", not "create a Gitea issue"), and the boundary clauses.
@@ -146,7 +158,9 @@ a skill that was never going to compete, not a second real one.
 
 **Never let a hyphenated routing target wrap across lines in a folded `>` scalar.** YAML folding
 replaces the newline with a space, so `gitea-labels-` at the end of one line and `milestones` at
-the start of the next fold into `gitea-labels- milestones`. `validate.sh` then reads the target as
-`gitea-labels`, finds no such skill, and reports a dangling boundary target — the live finding on
-`gitea-issues` today. Reflow the line so the whole name sits on one of them. The same applies to
-any backticked skill or agent name in a description.
+the start of the next fold into `gitea-labels- milestones`. The gate then reads the target as
+`gitea-labels`, finds no such skill, and reports a dangling boundary target. This is not
+hypothetical — it is how `gitea-labels-milestones` broke (issue #100). It is fixed: the corpus
+carries no dangling target today, and the repo's test suite pins that set as empty, so a
+reintroduction fails the suite rather than joining a backlog. Reflow the line so the whole name
+sits on one of them. The same applies to any backticked skill or agent name in a description.