Skill name+description pairs are preloaded into every session, costing
~6,200 tokens across 39 skills before any skill is invoked. The authoring
rules mandated that growth: skill-author:104 and description-quality.md:21
both required padding, while skill-author:102 (the deflating rule) had no
FAIL condition behind it.
Gates (blocking, no baseline file):
- description 250 chars SUGGESTION / 400 FAIL, measured on the folded
YAML value
- body-only 600 words SUGGESTION / 900 FAIL, independent of the unchanged
whole-file 2770-word / 500-line spec backstop
- every boundary-clause routing target must resolve to a real skill or
agent; catches skill-improve, neuledge-context and gitea-labels
- agents take the description gates but deliberately no body gate; a test
pins that absence
Vale: DescriptionOpener widened to ^This\b, new CompositionNote rule
banning architecture notes from descriptions. 10 hits, 0 false positives.
Kyberforge's own four skills retrofitted: descriptions 3,364 -> 938 chars
(-72%), bodies 8,306 -> 2,487 words (-70%), all via the apm-workflow
dispatch pattern. Fixes the skill-improve dangling route and the
agent-author misroute to manual review.
Also fixes a pre-existing false positive where any line-initial 'read '
was flagged as interactive input, which had already caused two scripts to
be rewritten around it.
Refs: ADR-0020
Two more efficiency findings from the same code-review pass:
- check-vale-style-sync.sh's hook_file_regexes() reparsed both
pre-commit manifests from scratch on every call. The final
validation loop calls it once per probe (3 probes: skill-audit once,
agent-audit twice for its two file shapes), so agent-audit's regex
set was being parsed twice for no reason. Now cached per skill in a
lazily-populated associative array, with a separate "seen" map so an
empty result isn't mistaken for "not yet computed."
- skill-size-check.sh read the target file twice (separate awk and
wc -w calls) to get line and word counts; now a single awk pass
returns both. Also documented, next to MAX_LINES/MAX_WORDS, why
those constants are duplicated against skill-audit/scripts/
validate.sh's Python implementation rather than unified — same
cross-language/cross-context tradeoff as vale-wrap.sh's duplication,
guarded by tests/test-skill-size-check.sh's drift check.
Verified: test-check-vale-style-sync.sh 20/20, test-skill-size-check.sh
9/9, full suite 12/12, pre-commit --all-files clean.
MAX_WORDS=2900 was calibrated to the corpus median density and carried no
margin: at the densest observed 7.22 chars/word (~1.81 tokens/word) it permits
~5,240 tokens against the 5,000 it proxies for. 2770 holds the worst observed
density under the ceiling. The largest SKILL.md is 2,489 words, so the change
costs nothing today — 281 words of margin — and the header comment now argues
the new calibration rather than swapping the digits.
Both enforcement points move together, and a new test asserts they agree, since
a SKILL.md passing its own audit while the commit hook blocks it is the
disagreement this pair exists to prevent.
CONTEXT.md is deliberately left ungated: it is 2,816 words, and gating it would
block the build. Recorded here so the omission reads as a decision rather than
an oversight.
skill-audit's manual-fallback path listed only the line ceiling, so an agent
taking that path passed an oversized SKILL.md the hook then rejected. The word
ceiling is now named alongside it. agent-audit is deliberately unchanged: the
size hook scopes to SKILL.md only and agent-audit's validate.sh has no word
gate, so claiming it there would be false.
The Vale research doc still showed the MDX {/* vale off */} form under a
Markdown heading, contradicting CONTEXT.md and vale-run's troubleshooting
reference — that form suppresses nothing in plain .md. Fixed in both places it
appeared.
tests/run-tests.sh used mapfile (bash 4.0+) with unguarded array expansion,
though AGENTS.md tells contributors to run it and macOS ships bash 3.2. It now
collects via a while-read loop over process substitution and guards every
expansion. The newline-delimited find|sort pipeline is kept rather than -print0
with sort -z, whose BSD portability is the weaker link, and which matches
mapfile -t's previous behaviour exactly.
Refs: #85
ADR: 0013
Three divergences between what the audit skills claim and what the hooks
enforce, each of which fails silently rather than loudly:
- `skill-size-check.sh` blocked at 2900 words while `validate.sh` checked only
the 500-line ceiling, so `/skill-audit` could report a skill ready to ship
that the commit hook then rejected. `validate.sh` now checks the same pair on
the same inclusive terms; the constants are duplicated with a comment naming
the other file, because a plugin skill's scripts cannot read outside the
plugin directory once installed to the cache.
- Both audit skills' Step 1 passed `--config assets/vale/.vale.ini`, which is
redundant (the wrapper self-locates its sibling config) and fragile: an agent
that resolves the script path against the skill directory but not the config
path gets E100, exit 2, which the surrounding fallback clause misreads as
"vale unavailable" and downgrades to full LLM judgment with no signal.
- The external-consumer test registered only the two Vale hooks, never the
third shipped hook, so a lost executable bit would have broken every consumer
while the local suite stayed green. Verified by mutation: `chmod 644` on the
copied script now turns three passes into two failures.
Also corrects the size hook's calibration comment, which claimed ~5.7-6.5
characters per word against a corpus whose measured median is 6.79 — the stated
upper bound sat below the median, so the "calibrated with margin" claim was
inverted for prose-dense files. MAX_WORDS is unchanged pending a decision; the
comment is now explicit that the gate holds under 5,000 tokens for typical
prose density, not for any file.
Refs: #85
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
Addresses PR #85's outstanding review items after grilling the open
questions against ADR-0013/CONTEXT.md/ADR-0010:
Blocking fixes:
- vale-wrap.sh: replace json.dumps() escaping (which silently defeated
Vale's frontmatter scope on any description containing a quote,
backslash, or non-ASCII char — ~58% of the corpus) with a single-quoted
YAML scalar, substituting a Unicode right single quote for embedded
apostrophes rather than '' doubling (Vale's frontmatter scanner isn't a
full YAML parser and silently truncates on '' too).
- vale-wrap.sh: fix a blank-line-inside-a-folded-description truncation
bug via indentation-based, blank-line-tolerant body capture; narrow
flattening to `>`-style scalars only (`|` already works unflattened).
- skill-audit/agent-audit Step 1: make the vale-wrap.sh invocation
cwd-independent via git rev-parse --show-toplevel, fixing a bug where
no single cwd satisfied all three Step 1 commands.
- styles/Kyberforge/VagueQualifier.yml: prune 17 tokens verified
false-positive-dominated on this repo's own voice via a real corpus
sweep (obvious, clearly, usually, several, simple, easy, completely,
simply, tiny, etc.), keep 13 with real or unattested noise. Revert the
28 prose "fixes" those tokens drove across 14 skill files back to their
original, correct wording, including a functional regression to
caveman/SKILL.md's own filler-word list (a mention, not a use) — now
guarded with vale-off comments against recurrence.
Gaps:
- --minAlertLevel=warning on the pre-commit hook and Step 1 invocation
so warning-level rules actually surface, without collapsing the
FAIL/SUGGESTION severity mapping skill-audit/agent-audit rely on.
- vale-wrap.sh: fix --config=<path> equals-form, absolute-path silent
no-op, and a zero-file-argument stdin hang.
- Route vale-run and lint-runner through a documented wrapper script
when a target repo has one, instead of unconditionally recommending
bare `vale`.
- Wire Kyberforge.VagueQualifier/SentenceOpenerThereIs into skill-audit/
agent-audit's dimension-mapping prose (Body discipline).
- Add plugins/lint/sources.md provenance for lint-runner (ADR-0010).
- Sync both marketplace.json lint-entry descriptions with plugin.json.
- Retune skill-size-check.sh's MAX_WORDS 5000->2900 (measured ~1.6-1.7
tokens/word on this repo's corpus, the old value gated at ~8,500
tokens against a stated 5,000 ceiling); fix the >/>= line-count
boundary and wc -l undercount on files with no trailing newline.
- Document the vale binary as a Setup prerequisite in AGENTS.md.
- Fix SentenceOpenerThereIs's dead regex alternative and add a real
sentence-start anchor/scope.
- Fix a stale docs/research/docs/vale/ index pointer in kyberforge's
docs README (moved to plugins/lint/ in e1a5403).
- Rewrite ADR-0013's Consequences section past-tense to describe what
actually landed, and record the styles-portability limitation
(repo-root placement stays intentional; deferred to a separate
session per this PR's review).
Test coverage: 9 new vale-wrap.sh fixtures (quotes, backslash/unicode,
blank-line paragraphs, --config= form, zero-arg/absolute-path handling,
literal-block no-regression) and boundary-pair tests for
skill-size-check.sh's line/word ceilings.
bash tests/run-tests.sh: 9 scripts + 125 bats assertions, all passing.
scripts/check-manifests.sh and claude plugin validate --strict: clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MCQ648fLSFXPHGZdQ8gn58
Deferred item from PR #85 review. Per ADR-0013: cherry-picks two low-noise
rules from trialing write-good/alex against the real corpus (VagueQualifier,
SentenceOpenerThereIs) into styles/Kyberforge rather than adopting either
package wholesale (both are tuned for blog prose and were noisy on this
repo's terse, imperative instruction files - see the ADR's rejected-rule
list). Adds a new skill-size-check pre-commit hook enforcing agentskills.io's
500-line/5,000-token SKILL.md ceiling, currently unenforced. Fixes the 28
resulting violations across 20 existing SKILL.md/agent files so the
enforcing pre-commit hook lands clean.
governance.md/CONTROLS.md were evaluated and excluded as rule sources -
they're org/CI-infrastructure controls, not prose patterns Vale can express.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QUDczvw1H3eEeMD29Q9Lbi
