skill-audit loaded roughly 4,268 words of rubric on every run, most of it
criteria for findings a clean skill never triggers. The auditing guidance moves
into finding-criteria.md, read only when a finding is actually raised, cutting
a clean audit to about 999 words. The named-skill exemption is replaced with
properties, so the rubric stops carrying a list that ages the moment a skill
is renamed.
apm-workflow's `type:` trap sat in one flow while biting several, so it is
promoted to a common gate reachable from all of them; its claim to be
self-contained was untrue once it started routing to apm-install. skill-author's
contract had drifted from body-discipline.md and is realigned, and agent-audit's
field inventory is brought in line with the same split.
The ADR-0020 body trim took `skill-audit` from 2,623 body words to a dispatch
shape, and two things went out with it that were not padding.
The manual structural fallback was one. Its replacement was a single sentence
telling the auditor to report an INFO when `validate.sh` cannot run — so with no
`python3` or no PyYAML, `skill-audit` reported the gap honestly and then audited
nothing structural at all. Every ADR-0020 measurement, the whole-file ceilings,
the name-to-directory match, the `references/` pointer check and the script
hygiene checks silently left the audit. A skill's whole Structure dimension
hanging on one optional interpreter is the same vacuous-pass shape the gate
scripts were just fixed for, one layer up.
The `E100 Runtime error ... does not exist` diagnostic was the other. That exit
code means an explicit relative `--config` was passed to `vale-wrap.sh` while
vale itself was installed and working; without the note, Step 1's fallback reads
exit 2 as "vale unavailable" and downgrades the description, body-discipline and
patterns dimensions to full LLM judgment for a config error it could have fixed.
That misreading is already recorded in CONTEXT.md as the reason both audit skills
stopped passing `--config` at all.
Both are restored in `references/validation-scripts.md`, loaded only when a Step 1
script fails — so the body pays nothing for them on a clean run, which is what the
dispatch pattern is for. The file also carries the by-hand boundary-target
procedure and the three ways to misread the result, including that
`INFO ... DID NOT RUN` is not a pass.
`references/file-structure.md` gains the one sanctioned spelling for a cross-skill
reference. The possessive form (``skill-audit's references/validation-scripts.md``)
is the only spelling both rules accept: a full repo path is what that section
already forbids, and a bare `references/<file>.md` is now a hard ERROR from the
ADR-0020 pointer check, which requires the file to exist in the skill's *own*
directory. Without the rule the two constraints look mutually exclusive.
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
