skill-frontmatter was a 62-line bash script inlined in
.pre-commit-config.yaml, re-parsing SKILL.md frontmatter with grep and
awk to check for name/description/metadata.version fields.
skill-size-check.sh already parses the same frontmatter block with
PyYAML for its ADR-0020 checks, so the two checks belonged in one
script.
Adds a ~20-line required-frontmatter check (name, description,
metadata.version as three-part semver) to scripts/skill-size-check.sh.
Removes the inline skill-frontmatter hook from .pre-commit-config.yaml
and deletes tests/test-skill-frontmatter.sh (366 lines). Removes the
79-line "the other hook on that scope" discussion from
docs/spec/gates.md and its now-dangling cross-reference, replacing
both with a one-line note of the fold, and updates the pre-push hook
counts there.
Updates fixture builders in test-skill-size-check.sh,
test-adr0020-body-checks.sh, test-adr0020-targets.sh,
test-adr0020-differential.sh, and test-vale-hooks-consumer.sh to carry
valid metadata.version so the new check doesn't spuriously fail
existing fixtures that predate it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YR2CjVumUbEGWcMikcoXBD
Every defect fixed in f7cc279 was reachable because nothing asserted against it.
The gate had 43 assertions and none of them covered a consumer repo, a non-string
description, an unclosed fence, or the two spec ceilings. Each case below fails
against the pre-fix code and passes against the current one; every one was proved
non-vacuous by mutating a scratch copy of the script and watching the test go red,
independently twice.
The two that mattered most had no fixture anywhere. A consumer repo WITH .git is
the shape the resolver exists to serve, and only the no-.git case had ever been
tested, which is exactly why the blocker was invisible. And ADR-0020 says the
walk-up runs in two passes specifically so a nested .git cannot beat a plugins/
root further up — no fixture had ever placed a .git inside a plugin.
test-adr0020-differential.sh loses _non_adr_hook_error(). It excluded MAX_LINES and
MAX_WORDS from the cross-script comparison on the untested assumption that awk and
splitlines() agree. They do not, and the divergence stayed invisible for exactly as
long as the exclusion stood. The ceilings are now compared like any other rule.
Two existing assertions were repairs, not additions. The skill-improve probe had
been fixed by this very branch, so its iteration permanently took an
assertion-free SKIP that still counted as a pass; both branches now fail loudly and
each names the other file's pin so the two stay in step. And the yaml-none fixture
emitted `---/---`, which never matched the frontmatter pattern at all — it passed on
the bare word "frontmatter", present in both messages, while never reaching the
branch it was named for. Needles throughout that file now name their branch.
Refs: #99
ADR: 0020
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015W3iwF9ncfRZddGBxsMCYi
Three ways the gates could report green having measured nothing. All three were
invisible to a passing test suite, because pre-commit prints nothing at all for a
hook that exits 0 — a gate that declines to check and a gate that checked and
passed produce the identical signal.
- A UTF-8 BOM, a leading blank line, a trailing space after a `---` marker or
CRLF line endings defeated the `^---\n` frontmatter matcher. Every ADR-0020
check was then skipped and the file passed: measured at the time, a
550-character description with a 1,000-word body exited 0 behind a BOM.
All four shapes are now tolerated, and frontmatter that genuinely cannot be
parsed is a hard ERROR rather than a silent skip.
- An agent file with a valueless `description:` followed by another key let a
line regex capture the *next* key, which looked non-empty, so the
missing-or-empty branch never fired and every gate below it early-returned on
the empty folded value — zero output, exit 0, on a blocking gate. The one
field this contract is entirely about was the one field a gate could fail to
notice was absent. Presence is now decided on the YAML-folded value and
nowhere else, and a missing or empty description is a hard FAIL in all three
validators.
- The hand-rolled frontmatter fallback disagreed with PyYAML across the FAIL
boundary on folded scalars, so which reader happened to be available decided
the verdict. A fallback that mis-parses a scalar shape reports a vacuous pass,
which is worse than not running, so it is deleted: python3 and PyYAML are hard
requirements that fail loudly with an install pointer.
Boundary-target resolution no longer derives its universe from its own location.
A `${BASH_SOURCE}`-relative repo root leaked this repo's 39-skill universe into
every consumer repo running the hook through pre-commit, so a consumer skill
routing to `skill-audit` resolved against a plugin it had never installed. The
interim form resolved through `.claude/` and `.agents/`, which are gitignored
`apm install` output — the same commit reported 2 dangling targets on a machine
that had run the install and 6 on a fresh clone. Resolution now walks up from the
file being checked to an authoring root (nearest ancestor holding
`plugins/*/.apm/{skills,agents}`, else the nearest `.git`, in two passes so a
nested `.git` cannot outrank a real monorepo root); the universe is every skill
and agent under `<root>/plugins/*/` plus the file's own apm package and that
package's declared `dependencies.apm`. Deployed trees are consulted only when no
authoring root exists at all — the consumer case. One commit now gets one verdict,
which a gate shipping hot with no baseline file has to.
Narrowed in the same pass: a routing target inferred from the prose boundary form
and corroborated by nothing else reports at SUGGESTION instead of blocking. A
blocking check with no escape hatch is the wrong trade when the inference from
prose is the weak part of it.
New deterministic checks, all previously untested or absent: every
`references/<file>.md` a body names must exist (ERROR — a broken pointer is not a
style opinion); a description with no boundary clause at all, a Gotchas section
over five entries, and a Gotchas section over 25% of the body are SUGGESTIONs.
Where no universe can be determined the target check prints `INFO ... DID NOT
RUN` rather than passing quietly. Each prose-scanning check needed its own
false-positive fix — a fenced example of a Gotchas section was being read as the
section itself — and those fixes are pinned rather than assumed.
The resolver is one block copied verbatim into all three scripts between
BEGIN/END markers, because a cache-installed plugin's scripts cannot read outside
their own plugin directory. Nothing asserted the copies were still identical; a
one-line edit to a single copy passed every constant-agreement assertion, since
constants are not what drifts.
Tests land here rather than in a later commit. The existing suites assert the old
behaviour and go red against these scripts, so splitting them would leave a commit
whose own `run-tests` pre-push gate fails in isolation.
Refs: ADR-0020