ADR-0020 shipped its gates hot with no baseline file, so 26 of 39 descriptions
and 9 of 39 bodies are over their FAIL tier and editing any of them for any
reason requires bringing the skill into contract first. `references/improve.md`
said exactly that and stopped there — it mandated a retrofit and supplied no
procedure for one.
Four dry-run retrofits confirmed what that costs. Asked the same questions —
what to cut first, when a body is two flows rather than one, what else has to
change alongside — they invented six to ten different answers, so the same skill
retrofitted twice produced two different skills and neither run could be reviewed
against anything.
`references/retrofit.md` fixes the answers: an ordered cut list ranked by tokens
removed against behaviour lost (inverting that order is how a retrofit deletes the
instruction the skill existed to carry), the test for whether a body holds two
mutually exclusive flows, the reference-file conventions, the collateral checklist
for `README.md` and `references/sources.md`, and a worked description retrofit.
It also states the trap the dry runs kept hitting: retrofit the skill in place,
inside its package. The boundary-target universe is built by walking up from the
file being checked, so a scratch copy has no authoring root above it, the check
prints `INFO ... DID NOT RUN`, and the run still exits 0 — a line that reads as a
pass and is not one. A retrofit signed off on a copy carries an unverified
boundary target into the corpus.
Loaded from the improve flow only when a budget is actually exceeded, so a routine
improvement pays nothing for it.
Refs: ADR-0020, #99
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
Why:
ADR-0015 established that Microsoft APM (apm.yml + .apm/) should replace
this repo's hand-authored plugin.json/marketplace.json model, with those
files becoming compiled output of `apm pack` instead of files edited by
hand via the (now-retired) plugin-author/marketplace-author skills.
Issue #90 was the deferred execution of that decision, gated on #88
(apm tooling) and #89 (apm-native agent-author/skill-author routing).
Implementation notes:
- All six plugins (bin, core, git, gitea, kyberforge, lint) now carry
apm.yml + .apm/{skills,agents,hooks} as their authoring source. Skills
moved with a plain git mv (content-identical across targets). Agents
were re-authored, not moved: per ADR-0016, .apm/agents/*.agent.md
compiles verbatim to both Claude and Copilot, so plugin-scope agents
now carry only name/description/model/source_keys -- no tools: field,
no Claude-only knobs (isolation, maxTurns, effort, memory,
permissionMode).
- Root apm.yml registers all 7 marketplace packages (6 local plus
mattpocock-skills as a remote entry) under versioning: per_package,
matching this repo's existing independent-plugin-versioning practice.
- .claude-plugin/marketplace.json and every plugin's plugin.json are now
apm-pack-compiled output, verified against the prior hand-maintained
content: same names/descriptions/versions/licenses/authors, only
cosmetic serialization differences (JSON key order, owner email vs.
url, Unicode escaping).
- plugin-author and marketplace-author are retired now that apm-based
authoring fully replaces their job; kyberforge bumped 1.3.1 -> 1.4.0
for that removal, and the root marketplace catalog bumped
0.3.1 -> 0.3.2 to match, per the version-bump convention now
documented in apm-workflow's reference docs instead of a dedicated
script (apm has no native version-bump automation).
- Fixed hardcoded pre-.apm/ path assumptions across
.pre-commit-config.yaml, .pre-commit-hooks.yaml,
scripts/check-scope-walkup-sync.sh, scripts/sync-vale-styles.sh,
scripts/check-vale-style-sync.sh, six plugins' root plugin.json
(stale skills/hooks/agents pointer fields that check-manifests.sh
validates), and several tests/*.bats and tests/*.sh fixtures --
including a bats REPO_ROOT relative-path depth bug (10 files, one
extra .apm/ directory level to walk up) and a vale probe-path
isolation regression introduced mid-fix.
- Corrected empirically-wrong assumptions surfaced this session in
apm-workflow/apm-install's own reference docs: `apm marketplace
package add` does not accept local paths (only owner/repo remote
shorthand -- local packages are registered by editing apm.yml's
marketplace.packages[] directly); `apm compile` is a consumer-side
AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md generator, not the plugin.json producer, and
hard-fails on skill/agent-only packages without --clean; `apm plugin
init <name>` nests a stray subdirectory when run with a positional
name arg from inside a same-named directory; no native Copilot
marketplace output profile exists; .mcp.json is merged into the
compiled plugin.json content-aware and target-scoped, with no
dependencies.mcp entry needed for simple passthrough; pipx is the
correct pip fallback on externally-managed Python environments.
- Renamed agent-author's copilot.agent.md template asset to
copilot.agent.md.template so apm compile's recursive *.agent.md glob
stops misparsing the placeholder template as a real agent primitive.
Impact:
plugin.json and marketplace.json are compiled artifacts from here on --
editing them by hand is no longer the workflow; edit apm.yml/.apm/ and
run apm pack. CONTEXT.md's Plugin/Plugin marketplace glossary entries
reflect this. ADR-0001 is marked superseded, ADR-0006 moot, and
ADR-0010 updated for the new .apm/agents/ path (project/user scope
unaffected, per ADR-0016). Full local verification: claude plugin
validate --strict on all 6 plugins, apm audit --ci, apm marketplace
check, check-manifests.sh, and the full test suite (165/165 bats,
13/13 shell scripts) all pass clean.
Fixes: #90
Refs: #88, #89
ADR: 0015
ADR: 0016
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Ub96PyaSRD9BHPktotj1pC
