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
