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>
A prose-form routing target blocks a commit only when its own sentence names
another target that resolves. That makes the sentence splitter part of the
ADR-0020 contract rather than an implementation detail, and the naive
"period, space, capital" rule got it wrong in both directions:
- OVER-SPLIT: `e.g. "..."` is not a sentence end, but the quote looks like a
start. The clause was cut in half and the corroborator stranded on the far
side, so a genuinely dangling target silently demoted to SUGGESTION — a
measurement taken and then discarded, the vacuous-green shape this gate
exists to prevent. Seven such splits are live in the current corpus.
- UNDER-SPLIT: a sentence opening with a code span or a lowercase skill name
was not seen as a start, so two sentences merged and a resolving target
vouched for an unresolvable one it never stood beside — a hard FAIL with no
escape hatch, which is the exact failure corroboration was added to prevent.
The splitter now excludes the five abbreviations that occur in routing prose
and admits a backtick or lowercase letter as a sentence opener. Applied
byte-identically to all three copies of the shared resolver.
Verified zero-delta against the corpus: 37 ERROR / 58 SUGGESTION / 2 dangling
before and after, findings byte-identical. The exposure this closes is to the
descriptions #99 is about to rewrite, not to the ones already measured — which
is why the deferral reason recorded on PR #103 ("can move the documented corpus
counts") does not hold and the fix lands here rather than after the retrofit.
Three regression tests, one per direction plus the backtick opener, each proven
non-vacuous by reverting the splitter alone and watching it go red.
Refs: #99
ADR: 0020
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both AGENTS.md and ADR-0020 said deployed .claude/.agents trees are consulted "only
when no authoring root exists". That stopped being true in f7cc279: the walk-up
finds a root in any git repo, so the condition is now whether that root holds
plugins, not whether one was found at all. Left alone, the two documents describe a
resolver that no longer exists — and this repo's prose is load-bearing, since the
next agent reads it instead of the code.
Both now also record why a name-count delta is not an equivalent test, because it is
the obvious simplification and it is wrong: a single-plugin monorepo re-collects its
own package, adds no new name, and would pull the deployed trees back in.
ADR: 0020
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_015W3iwF9ncfRZddGBxsMCYi
The ADR was written against base commit `f9b919d` and then not updated as the
implementation moved, so several of its numbers were measuring one thing and being
read as another — the exact conflation the ADR exists to stop, reproduced inside
it. Corrections, all reproducible now that each figure states its method:
- The preload tax is 23,427 chars / ~5,900 tokens, not 23,612 / ~6,200.
- `MAX_WORDS=2770` is a density proxy for the agentskills.io ~5,000-token ceiling,
not "2× p90". Neither percentile reaches it: 2× the body-only p90 is 2,698 and
2× the whole-file p90 is 3,052. Reading it as a percentile pairs a whole-file
gate against a body-only distribution.
- `apm-workflow` is a 421-word body; 554 is its whole-file count. `skill-author`
and `agent-author` were 2,623 and 2,582 body words — 2,760 and 2,758 whole-file,
which is where "within twelve words of the gate" comes from. Two numbers for one
file is the point, and only one of them is what either gate measures.
- Every `file:line` citation now says it resolves against `f9b919d`, since this
change rewrites most of the cited files.
Three things the ADR asserted that no validator implemented are now filed by tier
in an exhaustive enforcement table — deterministic, prose-pattern, or auditor
judgment — because a rule filed under "Enforcement" that nothing enforces is the
failure mode this ADR is most exposed to. The Gotchas entry count moves to
SUGGESTION to match the script; the paraphrase FAIL is marked as an auditor's,
since semantic equivalence is not pattern-matchable.
Two gaps recorded rather than quietly left:
- The agent body-gate exemption lives in `agent-audit`'s validator and in the
`skill-size-check` hook's `SKILL.md`-only `files:` pattern — *not* in
`scripts/skill-size-check.sh`, which measures whatever path it is handed and
today reports 900-word body FAILs on `git-orchestrate` (933),
`gitea-orchestrate` (1,199) and `apm-orchestrate` (1,080). Agents escape by file
pattern, not because the script knows the difference, so widening that pattern
would silently enforce a gate this ADR declines to set.
- The `skill-audit`/`agent-audit` merge is deferred to #101. This change made the
split deeper, not shallower: the dispatch retrofit took them from 3 and 4
reference files to 7 and 8, and their two same-named `description-quality.md`
files now differ on 100 of ~120 lines after normalising skill/agent. The merge
reopens ADR-0008 and touches every call site in `skill-author`, `agent-author`
and `forge`, so it is its own change. #100 carries the dangling-target fixes.
AGENTS.md and CONTEXT.md take the same corrections plus the two live setup
changes: PyYAML is now a hard requirement rather than an optional accelerator (a
fallback that mis-parses an unfamiliar scalar shape reports a clean pass on a file
it never measured), and `.claude/settings.json`'s `pretty-format-json` exclusion is
documented as load-bearing rather than as a tidy-up candidate.
LESSONS.md's autofix entry is corrected on its own provenance, which it got wrong
in both directions. `git log --date=iso` puts the introducing commit at 18:47 and
the fix at 21:54 — three hours, not "weeks" — and `git branch -a --contains` puts
the introducing commit on this branch only, not on main. It was manufactured
inside the same PR that diagnosed it. The added lesson is that "pre-existing" is a
claim about history and history is queryable: a defect found while working on a
branch feels inherited, and the feeling is not evidence.
Refs: ADR-0020, #99, #100, #101
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
Every installed skill's name+description is preloaded every session -
23,612 chars (~6,200 tokens) across 39 skills. The authoring rules
optimised for triggering reliability with no counter-pressure on size:
skill-author:104 and description-quality.md:21 both mandate padding,
while skill-author:102 (the rule that would deflate it) is
judgment-only and absent from description-quality.md's FAIL conditions.
ADR-0020 sets the description shape (trigger + one capability +
boundary), two-tier size gates sitting below the unchanged
agentskills.io ceilings, a mandatory dispatch pattern for multi-branch
bodies, a Gotchas constraint, an agent-side delegation check, and
invocation as a design axis. Gates ship blocking with no baseline.
Adds five CONTEXT.md glossary entries: preload tax, skill context
contract, dispatch body, hand-invoked skill, delegation discipline.
Refs: ADR-0020
