# skill-audit Audit a skill directory against the agentskills.io specification and the house context-budget contract (ADR-0020). Runs structural validation then a qualitative review across description quality, body discipline, patterns, formatting, file structure, scripts, and internal consistency, plus a provenance chain check. ## What it does 1. Runs `scripts/validate.sh` and `scripts/validate-provenance.sh` for structural and provenance checks, plus `scripts/vale-wrap.sh` — a Vale prefilter that deterministically flags non-imperative description openers, composition and architecture notes, vague wording, padding phrases, and "There is/are" sentence openers 2. Reads all files in the skill directory 3. Applies qualitative checks across five dimension groups — always loading `references/finding-criteria.md`, then one rubric from `references/` per group the criteria put in play 4. Outputs a compact findings report — findings only, grouped by dimension, each with Why and Fix — and a result block with handoff to `skill-author` `validate.sh` enforces two independent length families that must not be conflated: the agentskills.io spec conformance ceilings (500 lines, 2,770 words, both counting the whole file) and the ADR-0020 context budget (250/400 description characters, 600/900 body-only words). Alongside those it runs four shape checks that are not length measurements at all. Two are FAILs: every routing target named in the description — in the compressed `Not -> ` arrow **and** in the prose form — must resolve to a real skill or agent, and every `references/.md` the body names must exist on disk. Three are SUGGESTIONs: a missing boundary clause, a Gotchas section over five entries, and a Gotchas section over 25% of the body. The resolution universe for boundary targets is derived by walking up from the audited `SKILL.md` — the authoring root above it, its own apm package, and that package's declared `apm.yml` dependencies — so a fresh clone and a machine that has run `apm install` return the same verdict. When no universe can be determined the check prints `INFO ... DID NOT RUN` and does not silently pass. ## Usage ``` /skill-audit ``` Provide the path to the skill directory to audit when invoking. ## Files | File | Purpose | |------|---------| | `SKILL.md` | Skill instructions for agents | | `scripts/validate.sh` | Structural validator — checks name format, name matches directory, description presence and length, body-only word count, line and whole-file word ceilings, boundary-clause presence, boundary-target resolution, `references/` pointer existence, Gotchas entry count and body share, placeholder detection, script executable bit, and interactive-prompt detection | | `scripts/validate-provenance.sh` | Provenance validator — checks sources.md completeness, source_keys/slug consistency, Contributing files existence, bidirectional linkage, Research doc: fields, and upstream research doc alignment | | `scripts/vale-wrap.sh` | Vale prefilter wrapper — runs the bundled `Kyberforge` Vale styles against SKILL.md and reports alerts as deterministic FAILs ahead of Step 3's qualitative review | | `assets/vale/.vale.ini` | Vale configuration — points Vale at the bundled `Kyberforge` style path, self-located relative to `vale-wrap.sh` | | `assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/CompositionNote.yml` | Vale rule — flags composition and architecture notes in a description (e.g. "cross-cutting", "entry point", "rather than duplicating") | | `assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/DescriptionOpener.yml` | Vale rule — flags non-imperative "This..." description openers | | `assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/PaddingPhrase.yml` | Vale rule — flags generic "see references/" padding phrasing in conditional references | | `assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/SentenceOpenerThereIs.yml` | Vale rule — flags body sentences starting with "There is"/"There are" | | `assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/VagueWording.yml` | Vale rule — flags known filler wording (e.g. "helps with", "utilize") | | `references/finding-criteria.md` | Every dimension's FAIL and SUGGESTION criteria — the one Step 3 file loaded on every run; it decides which rubrics below are worth loading | | `references/description-quality.md` | Rubric for the description dimension — three-part shape, the 250/400-character budget, the hand-invoked (`disable-model-invocation`) contract, and the internal-mechanics FAIL | | `references/body-discipline.md` | Rubric for the body-discipline dimension — the core test, the 600/900 body-only budget against the 2,770-word whole-file backstop, the mandatory-dispatch rule, and the Gotchas constraints | | `references/patterns.md` | Rubric for the patterns dimension — which instruction construct fits which job, and how each is correctly formed | | `references/file-structure.md` | Rubric for the file-structure and internal-consistency dimensions — permitted directories, cross-plugin path rules and their two structural exemptions, README drift | | `references/formatting-and-scripts.md` | Rubric for the formatting and scripts dimensions — heading and fencing conventions, and the agentic-use criteria for bundled scripts | | `references/validation-scripts.md` | Step 1 troubleshooting — the manual structural fallback when `validate.sh` cannot run, and the script exit codes that are easy to misread (loaded only on a script failure) | | `references/sources.md` | Provenance record — agentskills.io sources that informed this skill and which files each contributed to | | `tests/validate.bats` | (source-only) Bats test suite for validate.sh | | `tests/validate-provenance.bats` | (source-only) Bats test suite for validate-provenance.sh | | `tests/README.md` | (source-only) Setup instructions for bats-support and bats-assert test dependencies | Rows marked **(source-only)** exist in the authoring source (`.apm/skills/skill-audit/`) but are not present in an installed plugin: `scripts/sync-plugin-content.sh` strips `//tests` when it generates the flat mirror, because these are dev-time fixtures no plugin host needs to discover (ADR-0017). Run them from a repo checkout, not from an install.