Why
The two audit skills carried 1,724 lines of byte-identical duplication: the ADR-0020 boundary
resolver (1,061), vale-wrap.sh (526), the Vale style rules (44) and the Contributing-files parser
(93). Nothing shared them — they were held in sync by a 413-line pre-push gate and its 797-line
test suite. Sync-by-gate had already failed once: at 484357a the two parser copies drifted into
different spellings of the bullet loop while a docstring asserted they were identical. That drift
was behaviour-neutral and was re-unified by hand at 598a7c3, so the copies were identical at merge
time — but nothing had caught it, and the next drift need not be neutral.
Implementation Notes
Self-containment binds BETWEEN skills, not within one. The agentskills.io spec forbids reaching
across skill directories, which is why two separate skills needed embedded copies; two files inside
ONE skill may source a third. That is the whole reason the merge removes duplication rather than
relocating it.
The union of both bodies measured 1,532 words against BODY_MAX_WORDS=900, and only 211 of those
words were shared, so SKILL.md is a dispatch body. Step 0 resolves the flow from the target path
before any validation, and its table mirrors validate.sh's detection exactly: a directory holding
SKILL.md or a SKILL.md file (skill); a *.agent.md, or a .md directly under an agents/ directory
(agent); anything else stops without running a validator. Steps 1-3 live in
references/skill-flow.md and references/agent-flow.md, and gotchas that apply to one flow live in
that flow's file, since it is loaded on every invocation anyway. If validate.sh reports on the
other artifact type, the body restarts at Step 0.
Named factory-audit rather than forge-audit because forge is a live skill, and a family prefix that
matches a live sibling reads as ownership rather than membership.
The description carries one arrow per boundary target, because ADR-0020 resolves only the first
target after an arrow. It drops the quoted "audit this skill"-style phrases, which restated
"audited" in a second register (ADR-0020's duplicate-register rule). 241 characters, Gotchas 16%
of the body: no size SUGGESTIONs.
The boundary resolver stays embedded in two files rather than imported: a cache-installed plugin
cannot read outside its own directory, and the repo-root hook resolves via .pre-commit-hooks.yaml
where entry[0] is the only token pre-commit rewrites, so no single file is reachable by both.
tests/test-adr0020-contract.sh hashes both copies for byte-identity, and asserts validate.sh sources
the resolver and that no third copy exists.
The entry scripts classify the target from its resolved parent directory, so a bare agent filename
typed inside agents/ works; resolve SCRIPT_DIR CDPATH-safely; and exit 2 when a lib-*.sh is
missing, rather than dying with exit 1, the tier the flows relay as real findings.
The provenance run functions stash their findings code in KYBERFORGE_PROV_RC and
return 0, so validate-provenance.sh calls them UNTESTED. Testing a function's
status (`f || RC=$?`) disables errexit for its entire body, and no subshell or
`set -e` inside can re-arm it once the call sits in a condition context
(measured, both spellings). Their error paths use `exit`, which is unaffected
either way; this keeps errexit armed for anything added later.
Case 0's readability guard reads the file instead of asking `[[ -r ]]`. `-r` is
access(2), which answers yes for uid 0 even on a mode-000 file, and this repo's
dev environment is root -- so the guard could never fire where it exists to fire.
A read attempt is also the stricter question, catching EIO. This is the reasoning
scripts/check-vale-style-sync.sh carried before this commit deleted it; the
hazard did not go with it.
All three entry scripts are CDPATH-safe, vale-wrap.sh included: both of its cd sites are cleared,
the --config resolution and the directory-mirror walk, where an exported CDPATH would otherwise
print a decoy path into the -print0 stream and build the mirror from the decoy's files. The two
remaining bare cd calls take absolute paths, which CDPATH is never consulted for.
Impact
BREAKING: skill-audit and agent-audit no longer exist as invocable skills. kyberforge goes to
2.0.0 (catalog 0.4.7).
Check logic is unchanged: differential runs of the old and new validators across every skill and
agent produced byte-identical stdout, stderr and exit codes, and the reconstructed Python payloads
differ only in comments and the references/field-inventory.md -> agent-field-inventory.md rename.
One doctrine governs the tiers: exit 0 is audited and clean, exit 1 is audited with findings OR a
target present but unreadable, exit 2 is that nothing was audited at all. Edge paths DID change,
deliberately (full table in ADR-0025):
- a missing target exits 2 (never ran), not 1, under its own "does not exist" message; detection is
by path shape, so a shape-matching path that is simply absent used to reach the validator and come
back as a FAIL against a file that never existed;
- an unshaped target exits 2 under the generic "matches neither" message, and a directory with no
SKILL.md under a third, distinct one -- three exit-2 messages, not one;
- a dangling symlink or a symlink loop stays exit 1: it is present but broken, which is a finding
about the artifact rather than a usage error;
- a SKILL.md file path is audited as its skill directory instead of refused;
- a .md agent outside an agents/ directory is refused rather than audited;
- a missing script library, a missing python3, a missing PyYAML, and no argument at all each exit 2.
validate-provenance.sh already exited 2 for the last two; validate.sh now matches it.
.pre-commit-hooks.yaml is a published contract consumed by external repos. Both hook IDs and both
files: regexes are unchanged; only entry: and description: moved.
scripts/check-vale-style-sync.sh (413), scripts/sync-vale-styles.sh (21),
tests/test-check-vale-style-sync.sh (797) and agent-audit/scripts/README.md (47) are deleted. The
checker made 17 assertions: 6 compared the two Vale copies and are moot; 10 are rehomed into
tests/test-vale-wrap.sh (case 0, cases 28-31, and the suite's Vale-absent skip); and the
cross-manifest files: agreement check, which selected hooks by entry: and so could not survive both
hooks sharing one, is ported as case 33 pairing hooks by id:. Cases 28, 30 and 33 carry mutation
self-tests; narrowing the local skill prefilter to 6 of 38 SKILL.md files now fails the suite.
Skills go 39 to 38. Pre-push goes 9 repo-authored hooks to 8.
ADR: 0025
BREAKING-CHANGE: the skill-audit and agent-audit skills are removed. Both flows are served by
factory-audit, which auto-detects whether it was handed a skill directory or an agent file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YR2CjVumUbEGWcMikcoXBD
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
