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.
configure.md said apm.yml's `type:` field "constrains what .apm/ may
contain" and that changing it later "does not retroactively validate what
is already on disk" — both implying a validation step that does not exist.
Read against the installed apm-cli 0.28.0: PackageContentType controls how
a package is processed during install/compile, apm_package.py only
enum-checks the declared string, and validate_apm_package() branches on the
structural type derived from files on disk, never on the declared field.
There is no content-vs-type mismatch check anywhere.
The hazard is therefore the opposite of what the wording primed for:
silent omission. A package declaring type: instructions while shipping
.apm/skills/ installs no skill and compiles AGENTS.md only, exits 0, and
reports success having shipped none of its primitives. The rule is now to
verify deployed output rather than the exit code. apm-orchestrate carried
the same wording as a Hard Rule and is corrected in step; its separate
defects stay with #120.
Also refreshes the exemplar figures this branch had re-staled. 264a5db set
them to 3,222 words of references; 6cb47f8 then added 63 words and
invalidated them, and the correction above adds more. Re-measured after
all edits: body 237 and whole-file 304 both still hold, references total
3,416. body-discipline.md's "roughly 3,200" moves with it.
ADR-0020 is deliberately untouched — it self-pins its citations to
f9b919d — as is the git-commits negative example pinned to 5e23250.
Refs #99
body-discipline.md and contract.md both cite apm-workflow by hard number
as the reference dispatch shape, and instruct authors to calibrate against
its body word count. The retrofit in 1e4aab5 moved every one of those
figures: body 421 -> 237, whole-file 554 -> 304, references 3,006 ->
3,222. Measured, not estimated.
The quoted closing line was stale too -- it now carries a continuation
clause, so it is quoted with an ellipsis rather than as a full sentence.
These are positive exemplars in live guidance, so they are refreshed
rather than pinned. That is the opposite treatment from the git-commits
negative example in the same file, which is pinned to 5e23250 precisely
so it keeps describing the pre-retrofit state. ADR-0020 carries the same
figures and is deliberately left alone: it self-pins every citation to
base commit f9b919d, and refreshing it would destroy the record of what
the decision was taken against.
Refs #99
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MWb5RQgCL1ye7cGp2RPb2u
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>
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
