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
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
Add Research doc: pointer to all 7 agentskillsio entries so the new
validate-provenance.sh upstream checks can resolve the research source.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Records the upstream agentskills.io sources that informed skill-audit,
continuing the research → docs → skill provenance chain.
- New references/sources.md with 7 extracted sources attributed to skill files;
agentskills-llms-txt demoted to discovery-only comment per skill-author precedent
- source_keys frontmatter added to SKILL.md (5 slugs), references/body-discipline.md
(agentskills-spec, agentskills-best-practices), and references/description-quality.md
(agentskills-spec, agentskills-optimizing-descriptions)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Add references/description-quality.md and references/body-discipline.md to
skill-audit — condensed, rubric-focused extracts from the agentskills.io
specification docs. Both files are loaded conditionally via progressive
disclosure triggers added to Step 3 (Description and Body discipline
dimensions), so the agent consults the spec source when a finding is
borderline rather than relying solely on inline heuristics developed
during the skill-write authoring cycle.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
