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
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
Skills now migrate from hand-authored plugin.json to Microsoft APM
(apm.yml + .apm/) per ADR-0015/issue #89. skill-author's write location
switches accordingly: walk up from the destination to the nearest
ancestor apm.yml declaring a type: field (skipping type:-less
marketplace-only manifests) and scaffold into <package-root>/.apm/skills/
<name>/. Standalone authoring (no apm.yml/.git anywhere, e.g.
~/.agents/skills/) is unchanged — only the old plugin.json-based path is
replaced, not standalone mode.
Refs: #89
- references/sources.md: add YAML frontmatter with source_keys to fix provenance chain break
- SKILL.md description: make create/improve duality explicit ("Handles both the full create flow ... and the improve flow ...")
- SKILL.md Step 2: add inline metadata.source_keys instruction — fill early, not deferred to Step 5
- SKILL.md Step 6 (create) / Step 5 (improve): add pre-audit manual checklists and version bump conventions (minor for create, patch for improve)
- README.md: correct false claim that the skill bumps plugin manifests; it bumps metadata.version only
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0147vXtL5sP6vorDdqXGJJU9
Add Research doc: pointer to all 7 agentskillsio entries so the new
validate-provenance.sh upstream checks resolve correctly for this skill.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- script: new-skill.sh now exits 0 when target already exists (idempotent
retry-safe) instead of exit 1; --help updated to reflect narrowed error cases
- test: updated bats test to assert success and "nothing to do" output
- body: removed speculative "Extract the skill from a real task" advice
(human-targeted, not agent-actionable)
- formatting: converted H4 headings in Step 2 to bold text (H2/H3 two-tier model)
- provenance: removed orphan agentskills-llms-txt entry from references/sources.md;
added discovery-only comment
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Records the upstream agentskills.io sources that informed skill-author,
completing the research → docs → skill provenance chain introduced in
the previous commit.
- New references/sources.md with all 7 extracted agentskillsio sources,
Contributing files attributed per-source to SKILL.md, references/deployment-modes.md,
and references/scripts.md
- source_keys frontmatter added to SKILL.md (all 7 slugs), references/deployment-modes.md
(agentskills-spec), and references/scripts.md (agentskills-using-scripts)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Body discipline: collapsed 4-bullet script rules to single critical callout
(no interactive prompts); full contract stays in references/scripts.md.
stderr discipline: redirect all confirmation/progress output in new-skill.sh
to stderr per scripts.md contract. Also expands references/scripts.md with
input validation and --help guidance.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016z2ZFYHQCex8yZAMVMTZzZ
Closes#5. Single authoring skill replaces the factory trio — one set of
standards, one script, one place for future governance rules. Routes to
create or improve flow based on context. Passes skill-audit with no findings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016z2ZFYHQCex8yZAMVMTZzZ
