Five documents told authors that a prose-form dangling routing target blocks. The
gate reports it as a SUGGESTION and exits 0. Verified on fixtures: `-> name` and
`/name` are blocking ERRORs, the prose form is SUGGESTION-tier unless a second
resolving target in the same sentence corroborates it. ADR-0020 and gates.md were
right; contract.md, retrofit.md, description-quality.md, finding-criteria.md and
agent-author's contract.md were wrong — and they are what an author and an auditor
actually read. The whole 39-skill corpus was retrofitted against them.
skill-audit was also self-contradictory: it imports validate.sh's SUGGESTIONs into
the Structure dimension verbatim while its own rubric grades the same target a FAIL,
so one target got reported twice at two tiers. The script owns the grade; the rubric
now says so.
The YAML-fold trap that broke gitea-labels-milestones (#100) was warned about only
in retrofit.md, reachable only from the improve flow when a budget is exceeded. It
is now in both contract.md files, which SKILL.md mandates on the create flow too.
agent-audit loaded both rubrics unconditionally on every run — 3,323 words for a
clean audit against skill-audit's 1,636. dac9cad fixed exactly this in skill-audit
and edited agent-audit in the same commit without applying it. Same treatment: the
criteria move to a new finding-criteria.md and load per dimension. Clean run now
2,083 words, a 37% cut.
Routing: apm-workflow's description shed dependency installation while still owning
the flow, and apm-install's boundary did not exclude it, so "install my apm
dependencies" matched the CLI-binary skill with no route back. Fixed on both sides.
forge regains two of the three phrasings the retrofit deleted.
forge Step 1 called grill-with-docs unconditionally — a skill in plugins/bin, which
kyberforge does not declare as a dependency. It resolves here only because the
walk-up sweeps sibling plugins; a standalone install dead-ends. Step 1 now names
the cross-plugin dependency and gives an inline fallback. Declaring it properly in
apm.yml remains the better fix.
Also: both audit SKILL.md files now grade exit 2 as "did not run, dimension
unverified" rather than as findings; skill-audit's README row described content that
moved, which its own finding-criteria.md grades a FAIL; and body-discipline.md's
`git show <sha>:plugins/...` command is fenced, since an installed plugin cache has
no repo and file-structure.md makes a bare repo path a FAIL.
Refs: #100, #101, #125
ADR: 0020
Closes the second open design decision on PR #103. The `/compact` finding was
recorded as a false positive needing an allowlist or a suppression mechanism.
It is neither: the routing universe is the apm marketplace, so a target either
resolves to a skill or an agent or it does not resolve, and `/compact`,
`/clear` and `/init` are Claude Code slash commands with no counterpart in
Copilot CLI or Codex. `.apm/` source compiles for all three, so a
vendor-neutral description routing to one is a portability defect and the hard
FAIL is a true positive.
An allowlist was rejected for a concrete reason, not a stylistic one: it
answers a different question ("does this exist on some host?"), it cannot
answer that portably from a single source file, and it goes stale the next
time a host ships a command — reintroducing the same-commit-two-verdicts
failure ADR-0020 already closed for deployed trees.
Nothing is blocked today: zero of the 43 descriptions name a host built-in,
and an author who needs to mention one writes it un-slashed, which is not
route notation and carries no routing claim.
Recorded in ADR-0020 and in both author-facing contract references, so the
next agent reads the decision rather than "fixing" the gate.
ADR: 0020
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Diffing each retrofitted SKILL.md against its replacement references/ files found
rules that existed on main and now existed nowhere — relocated in intent, deleted in
fact. A trim that loses a rule is not progressive disclosure, it is data loss with a
smaller word count.
Three had no survivor. The least-privilege guidance for `tools` kept its mechanics
and lost the "restrict to what the agent needs" half, so the remaining text read as
encouragement to omit the field. The improve flow lost its regression check, so
nothing compared the closing audit against the pre-edit state and a PASS quietly
becoming a SUGGESTION went unnoticed — restored on both halves of the author pair,
since agent-author had dropped its equivalent too. And agent bodies lost "would the
agent get this wrong without it?", which mattered more than it looks: ADR-0020
deliberately sets no body word gate for agents, three of the four already sit
between 933 and 1,199 words, and the delegation check only fires on procedure a
skill already owns. That heuristic was the only brake left.
Two more were reachable only from the wrong scope. agent-author tells the reader to
load only the file for the resolved scope, but the mcp__ glob syntax for
disallowedTools and the five tools no subagent ever receives had both landed in
project-user-scope.md. disallowedTools is the ONLY permitted fence at plugin/APM
scope, so the scope that needs the syntax most could not reach it, and a plugin-scope
run could write a body telling the agent to ask the user a question.
Two documents were actively wrong rather than merely thin. agent-audit told auditors
that validate.sh resolves boundary targets for skills only; it runs at both scopes,
so the auditor was hand-resolving what the script had already decided and could
contradict it. And skill-audit routed to its script-troubleshooting reference
whenever validate.sh "fails" — but it exits 1 on ordinary content FAILs, the normal
outcome for the whole #99 population, so 1,302 words loaded on nearly every audit.
A context-budget regression inside the skill that enforces the context budget.
Finally, two illustrations taught the shape the gate ERRORs on, unfenced, while an
adjacent rubric called it a hard ERROR.
LESSONS.md records the reference-chain depth rule flipping from "one level deep" to
"two hops, never three". ADR-0020 is silent on it and the reversal rode entirely on
the diff; the looser rule is what mandatory dispatch requires.
Refs: #99
ADR: 0020
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015W3iwF9ncfRZddGBxsMCYi
Six defects, each one a place where two files that an author reads in the same
sitting told them different things — or where the trim dropped a rule and nothing
noticed because no gate covers prose.
**"Use proactively" contradicted itself across the pair.** All three agent
templates said to add it where the runtime should delegate unprompted, while
`agent-audit`'s `KyberforgeCopilot.ProactivePhrase` rule grades it a hard FAIL in
any `*.agent.md` — which is the Copilot half of every project/user pair *and* the
vendor-neutral plugin-scope file, since that compiles to a real Copilot agent
downstream. Following the template produced a file the repo's own gate rejects.
The phrase is now permitted in exactly one place, the Claude Code `.md`, and
`references/contract.md` carries the per-file table plus the consequence authors
ask about next: a pair whose CC half has it and whose Copilot half does not is
correct, because `agent-audit` checks that both halves describe the same job, not
that they match word for word.
**The output-schema rule contradicted itself inside one file.** `contract.md`
said any content only one branch reaches moves to `references/`, and then offered
an "Output format template" body pattern with no qualification. Stated once now,
so it is not re-litigated: an output schema stays in the body only when every flow
produces it and it is roughly 50 words or less. No third option.
**Gotchas tiers disagreed with the script.** `validate.sh` emits the entry count
through `suggest()` and exits 0, while `skill-author` and `skill-audit` both
called more than five entries a FAIL. Whether a given gotcha earns its place is
judgment, so the prose moves to the script's tier rather than the reverse. The
paraphrase rule stays a FAIL and is explicitly marked as the auditor's call — no
script detects it.
**The dispatch exemplar was cited at the wrong number.** `apm-workflow`'s body is
421 words; 554 is its whole-file count. Both `contract.md` and `body-discipline.md`
cited 554 while describing a body budget, so an author calibrating against the
exemplar overshot by ~30% — the exact whole-file/body-only conflation those two
sections exist to warn against, reproduced inside the warning.
**"Error handling" came back as a required body element.** It was one of four and
is the one that gets dropped, and dropping it is not neutral: an agent handed
malformed input with no instruction invents a recovery, and a subagent's invented
recovery is invisible to its caller until the output is wrong. Restored in
`agent-audit`'s rubric as a SUGGESTION, in `agent-author`'s contract and both
scope checklists as a required element, and as an `## Errors` section in all three
templates.
**`skill-author` Step 4 gains the one check the audit misses.** An empty body
reports `PASS SKILL.md body word count 0` — a word gate cannot tell "concise"
from "absent". Step 4 now hand-checks for a non-empty section, and its commit
verification is conditioned on actually being inside a git worktree, which a skill
under `~/.claude/skills/` is not.
Also here: absolute repo paths removed from `skill-author`'s SKILL.md and
contract.md in favour of naming the skill (`zoom-out`'s description is quoted
inline instead of pointed at), the boundary-target universe documented to match
the resolver, a two-hops-from-SKILL.md limit on reference chains, and
`new-agent.sh`'s next-steps output naming the description budget and the
deliberate absence of an agent body gate.
Refs: ADR-0020
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
Output of scripts/sync-plugin-content.sh --all against this round's .apm/
source edits. No file here is hand-edited.
Carries agent-author's scaffolder and its contract doc into the flat mirror.
No compiled manifest changed: nothing in this round touched apm.yml, so apm
pack and sync-marketplace-mirror.sh both produced byte-identical output.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01X7GvKuJfy2WrdBmUttV4DT
Output of scripts/sync-plugin-content.sh --all against this round's .apm/
source edits. No file here is hand-edited.
Carries the agent-author and agent-audit documentation changes into the flat
mirrors. No compiled manifest changed: nothing in this round touched apm.yml,
so apm pack and sync-marketplace-mirror.sh both produced byte-identical output.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01X7GvKuJfy2WrdBmUttV4DT
Claude Code's (and Copilot's) native plugin installer has zero awareness of
.apm/ nesting -- it convention-scans only flat skills/, agents/, commands/,
hooks.json at each plugin's root. Confirmed via strings on the installed
claude binary and live installs of git@holocron/gitea@holocron/kyberforge@
holocron, all reporting Skills(0) Agents(0) Hooks(0) post ADR-0015's apm
conversion. Root cause (apm_cli/core/plugin_manifest.py): apm's plugin.json
compiler deliberately strips skills/agents/commands keys, assuming the host
already auto-discovers those convention directories -- it has no model of
.apm/ being host-visible at all. Separately, apm's own bundle exporter
(apm_cli/bundle/plugin_exporter.py, behind `apm pack --format plugin`)
implements the correct .apm/ -> flat mapping, but only ever targeted
build/<name>-<version>/, a path nothing in marketplace.json's source: points
at.
scripts/sync-plugin-content.sh wraps that bundle exporter and copies its
agents/, skills/, commands/, instructions/, extensions/, and merged
hooks.json back into each plugin's own root as a second tracked
compiled-output category -- same governance status as
.claude-plugin/plugin.json: generated from .apm/, never hand-edited. tests/
subdirectories are excluded from the mirror (dev fixtures, not host-visible
runtime content; several hardcode a relative repo-root walk-up sized for the
.apm/-nested depth, which breaks when duplicated one level shallower).
Applied for real across all 6 plugins and verified two ways: `claude plugin
validate --strict` passes on every real plugin directory, and a live
`claude --plugin-dir <path> -p "list skills/agents"` behavioral test
confirms content is now actually discovered.
Also, from the same issue #90 review round:
- scripts/check-manifests.sh pointed at each plugin's root-level plugin.json
(checking skills/hooks/mcpServers/agents pointer fields) -- that file was a
stale near-duplicate of .claude-plugin/plugin.json nothing else read or
wrote, now deleted across all 6 plugins. check-manifests.sh is rewritten to
validate .claude-plugin/plugin.json instead, and drops the pointer-field
checks entirely (nothing to check -- those fields are correctly absent by
design). Content-presence drift is now check-plugin-content-sync's job, a
new pre-push hook wired in .pre-commit-config.yaml.
docs/adr/0017 records the root cause and decision in full, including two
rejected alternatives (patching plugin.json's path fields directly -- apm's
compiler strips them on every run; pointing marketplace.json at apm pack's
build/ output -- a version-suffixed non-source directory nothing can install
from without an extra build step). ADR-0015 and CONTEXT.md are updated to
point at it.
Refs: #90
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
field-inventory.md's apm-agent-allowlist and validate.sh's runtime
check already included source_keys as a 4th allowed field, and the
apm-agent.md template already instructed authors to add it for
provenance tracking — but SKILL.md (x2), README.md, ADR-0016, and
deployment-modes.md still described the allowlist as name/description/
model, "nothing else". The template itself even contradicted its own
source_keys guidance with a header claiming "ONLY the three fields
below — full stop" directly above it.
Updates all six locations to document source_keys as the intentional
4th field, resolving the contradiction.
Plugin scope now authors a single vendor-neutral .apm/agents/<name>.agent.md
file (name/description/model/body only) instead of a Claude Code + Copilot
CLI pair, per ADR-0016: apm compile has no per-target field integrator, so
tools: and all Claude-only fields (isolation/maxTurns/effort/memory/
permissionMode) are omitted entirely rather than shipping a value that's
guaranteed wrong on one harness. Scope detection switches from a flat
plugin.json check to the same apm.yml+type: walk-up agent-audit's
validate.sh already uses. Project scope and user scope are unaffected —
both keep the existing dual-file pair model.
Refs: #89
Corrects three FAIL findings from the skill-audit run:
- Scope detection table in SKILL.md and references/scripts.md now lists all
four plugin-marker variants the script actually checks (plugin.json,
.claude-plugin/plugin.json, .plugin/plugin.json, .github/plugin/plugin.json)
- assets/README.md copilot.agent.md description was wrong about field set;
replaced with accurate CLI-format description noting excluded cloud/IDE fields
and the Copilot tool aliases actually used.
Also applies the SUGGESTION: moves the conditional reference
(`If the destination is a plugin directory, read references/deployment-modes.md`)
out of the ## Gotchas section body and into ## Route as a standalone line,
immediately after ## Gotchas closes.
INFO findings (source_keys frontmatter) were already present in both
references/README.md and references/scripts.md — no change needed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0147vXtL5sP6vorDdqXGJJU9
## Why
skill-author explicitly excludes agent definition files ("Do not use to author
agent definition files"). No factory skill existed to create or improve the
.md / .agent.md files that define Claude Code subagents and Copilot CLI agents
in a plugin, project, or user scope. This fills that gap.
## Implementation Notes
Single-root scaffold convention: new-agent.sh <name> <root> derives both
provider file paths from the root by convention — plugin scope (plugin.json
present) writes both files into <root>/agents/; non-plugin scope writes
.claude/agents/<name>.md and .github/agents/<name>.agent.md. This keeps
input minimal while always generating both provider files. See ADR-0015.
Routing is file-level (not directory-level like skill-author): neither file
exists → create flow; at least one exists → improve flow; scaffold is a
file-by-file no-op so retries are safe.
No companion agent-audit skill — inline validation in the close step covers
the simpler agent field contract. agent-audit is tracked as a follow-on.
## Impact
Closes the skill-author gap for agent definitions. Follow-ons tracked in
Gitea #11: agent-audit skill and --copilot-dest override flag for non-standard
Copilot project paths.
---
ADR: docs/adr/0015-agent-author-dual-provider-scaffold.md
Refs: #10
Co-authored-by: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
