Files
holocron/docs/adr/0013-vale-harness-scope-and-rule-sources.md
Defame1297 061bb3d5b4 docs: correct the apm-only change after a five-agent review
A five-agent review of 718c79a and d2480b8 found no skill, agent or hook
regressions (39 skills before and after) and confirmed both hook removals
are genuinely moot -- verified against the tree, not taken on the commit's
word. It did find one functional regression (fixed separately) and this
documentation drift.

Counting errors, all from a git pathspec `*` crossing `/`:
  - 17 .bats files shipped to consumers is really 10; 17 counted tracked
    paths merely containing /tests/, one of them a template asset
  - "roughly 88s off every push" is ~92.4s; 88 omitted validate-plugins
  - "roughly 70% of each plugin remains live" holds only for kyberforge;
    the real spread is 44.3% (bin) to 70.6%, now a table
  - the pre-push enforcement row was half-corrected: 33 entries stood
    unstruck (now 27) and 14 -> 11 switched counting basis mid-sentence
  - the root .claude-plugin/plugin.json was described as "kept"; it has
    never been tracked

gates.md said "Ten hooks" above a nine-row table (11 was decremented for
one removal, not two), and "both need the claude CLI" for one remaining
validator. Its pretty-format-json exclude rationale claimed six
alternations expanding to sixteen files in a passage headed "Mind which
number you are quoting" -- four alternations, two live files; the two
dead ones are dropped from the pattern. check-useless-excludes could not
catch this: it only flags an exclude matching nothing at all.

ADR-0024 cited ADR-0006 for a patch-bump rule it does not contain and
which ADR-0015 explicitly retired; stated apm's marketplace probe order
backwards (.claude-plugin/ is the last candidate, not the first, so the
earlier .github/plugin/ deletion only demoted resolution); undercounted
apm's skill-deploying targets as seven when there are fifteen; and never
recorded that validate-plugins was removed. The symlink hedge is resolved:
apm_cli/security/gate.py's ignore_non_content() drops symlinks silently on
deploy while apm_modules/ materialization dereferences them, so content
survives that far and vanishes at install. Accepted with no replacement
guard, per decision -- kyberforge/docs/hooks.md previously asserted a
guard that had been deleted with its script.

Four plugin READMEs still advertised `claude plugin install`; ADRs 0001,
0006, 0013, 0014, 0015 and 0019 described deleted machinery in the present
tense, 0019 most consequentially as the live justification for the
SessionStart hook's .apm/ path. CONTEXT.md's "apm package" entry forbade
"plugin" while using it in its own body, and "Output profile" lost the
antecedent for "one catalogue serves both".

run-tests.sh gains the .claude/skills/ exclusion run-bats.sh already had.
Latent today -- no test-*.sh lives under any .apm/skills/*/tests/ -- but
apm now deploys those directories, so one would be discovered twice.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YR2CjVumUbEGWcMikcoXBD
2026-09-14 18:09:03 +00:00

130 lines
10 KiB
Markdown

# Vale audit prefilter expands into a plugin-content harness, scoped to prose-pattern rules only
Issue #84 wired Vale as a deterministic prefilter for `skill-audit`/`agent-audit`, scoped to
exactly four pattern-matchable checks (imperative description opener, vague capability wording,
generic reference-pointer padding, Copilot's dead `Use proactively` phrasing), documented only in
CONTEXT.md's "Vale audit prefilter" section — never its own ADR — and explicitly excluding body
discipline, near-miss exclusion strength, and control calibration as non-goals. This ADR records a
deferred PR #85 review item to broaden that coverage, retroactively captures #84's own rationale
(since it was never recorded as a decision in its own right), and layers the expansion on top
without reversing or weakening the original four rules.
**2026-08-17 amendment.** The CONTEXT.md section named above no longer holds that documentation.
CONTEXT.md was cut back to a glossary and the prefilter's mechanics — the two-copy style layout,
`vale-wrap.sh`, the `--config` argv defect, the rule inventory, and the 0-files-means-NOT-RUN
fallback — moved to `docs/spec/gates.md`. Read that file, not CONTEXT.md, for the harness itself;
this ADR still owns the scope decision.
**File scope stays the same.** `SKILL.md` plus agent files (`**/agents/*.md`,
`**/*.agent.md`) only — matching the existing prefilter's globs. Skill-level
`README.md` files and `plugin.json` manifests are not added: README.md files are navigational, not
spec-governed content, and `plugin.json` is JSON, not prose Vale can meaningfully lint.
**Rule categories are prose-pattern-matchable only.** Structural, schema, and security concerns
stay out of this Vale-based harness because this repo already has dedicated tools for them:
`skill-frontmatter` (required frontmatter fields), `validate-marketplace`
(`claude plugin validate --strict`, schema), and `gitleaks`/`detect-private-key` (secrets).
(ADR-0024 removed the companion `validate-plugins` gate along with the per-plugin manifests it
checked; the argument here is unaffected.)
Duplicating those concerns as Vale rules would fight tools that already own them better.
**Governance docs are excluded as a rule source.** `docs/research/governance_principles/CONTROLS.md`
and `governance.md` were investigated and found to contribute nothing minable: CONTROLS.md is
org/CI-infrastructure controls (secret scanning, dependency/license scanning, agent permission
scoping, audit logging, human approval gates, periodic reviews) — none of it is a prose pattern
expressible as a Vale rule against SKILL.md/agent-file text, and what it does cover is either
already handled elsewhere (gitleaks) or genuinely out of scope for a plugin-content prose harness
(dependency/license scanning is a code-dependency concern, not skill authoring).
**Spec-derived custom rules stay mostly as-is.** Re-reading agentskills.io's
`optimizing-descriptions.md` and `skill-authoring.md`, plus `claude-code-plugins/agent-definition.md`
and `github-copilot-plugins/agent-definition.md`, found that the existing four Kyberforge rules
already cover the pattern-matchable surface those specs describe. The remaining spec guidance —
calibrating control vs. giving freedom, avoiding menus of options, coherent skill scope, moderate
detail level — is semantic judgment, already `skill-audit`'s job via LLM review, not new lintable
rules. One confirmation surfaced: Claude Code's `Use proactively` phrasing is meaningful for `.md`
agent files (it triggers auto-invocation), unlike Copilot's `.agent.md` files where it's dead
phrasing — so `KyberforgeCopilot/ProactivePhrase`'s existing `.agent.md`-only scope is correct and
must not be extended to `.md` files.
**`write-good`/`alex` are trialed, not adopted wholesale.** These built-in/third-party Vale
packages are tuned for general blog-style prose (passive voice, weasel words, wordy phrases) and
are expected to be noisy against this repo's terse, imperative instruction-file corpus. Only
individual rules proven low-noise against the existing corpus get cherry-picked into
`styles/Kyberforge`; the packages are never referenced wholesale in `BasedOnStyles`.
**A new non-Vale check closes a real gap.** `skill-authoring.md` states `SKILL.md` should stay
under 500 lines / 5,000 tokens — currently unenforced anywhere in this repo. This is a whole-file
length ceiling, not a text pattern, so it isn't a Vale rule — it becomes a new deterministic script
and pre-commit hook, sibling to the existing `skill-frontmatter` hook.
**Rules land directly in `styles/Kyberforge`, enforcing immediately.** No trial/report-only tier
is introduced (see Considered Options). "Enforcing immediately" holds only because every rule in
both styles is `level: error`: Vale's exit code keys on `error`-level alerts alone, so a
`warning`- or `suggestion`-level rule prints an alert and still exits 0, and pre-commit suppresses
output from hooks that pass — such a rule is invisible and blocks nothing. Every Vale alert is
therefore a FAIL, in the audit skills and in the blocking pre-commit hook alike, with no ignorable
tier; that matches every other gate in this repo (shellcheck, the test suite,
conventional-pre-commit). The implementation pass finalizes the cherry-picked
`write-good`/`alex` rules and any new spec-derived rule wording, runs the full set against the
existing SKILL.md/agent-file corpus, fixes any resulting violations across that corpus, and lands
the rule changes and the corpus fixes as one atomic commit — the same enforcement model as the
original four rules, never a partial or opt-in state.
## Considered options
**Phased rollout via a separate trial style + config (rejected).** A `styles/KyberforgeTrial/`
directory plus a parallel `.vale.trial.ini` (mirroring the root config's globs but with
`BasedOnStyles = Kyberforge, KyberforgeTrial`) would let new rules be swept report-only via
`lint-runner`/`vale-run` before promotion into the enforcing `styles/Kyberforge` + root
`.vale.ini`. This was considered because `BasedOnStyles = Kyberforge` activates every rule file
under that directory automatically — there's no partial/opt-in application within a style, so a
rule dropped straight into `styles/Kyberforge` goes live in the blocking pre-commit hook
immediately. Rejected in favor of finalizing rules directly and fixing violations via subagent
before committing: simpler, no new trial-config machinery to build or maintain — at the cost of no
standing report-only tier for future candidate rules. Note that the first implementation shipped
graded severities (`error`/`warning`/`suggestion`) and thereby recreated the rejected option by
accident: the five non-`error` rules never affected an exit code and never surfaced output through
a passing pre-commit hook, so they were a report-only tier that reported to nobody. Flattening
every rule to `level: error` is what actually implements this decision.
## Consequences
- `styles/Kyberforge/` gained one new rule file, cherry-picked from `write-good`/`alex` as
low-noise against this repo's corpus: `SentenceOpenerThereIs.yml` (22 hits across 273 held-out
markdown files; both in-corpus hits were clean rewrites, needing no suppression).
- A second candidate, `VagueQualifier.yml`, was cherry-picked and then dropped. Against the 41
skill/agent files it hit twice: one marginal real finding (`prototype/SKILL.md`, "very different"
→ "fundamentally different") and one false positive (`caveman/SKILL.md`, which *quotes* `of
course` as an example of filler — a mention, not a use) that no rewrite could clear, forcing the
repo's only Vale suppression comments. Of its 15 held-out hits, 9 were in `docs/research/examples/`
(out-of-scope upstream material) and the remaining 6 were the word "very" in two idioms in a
single research doc, each already adjacent to the hard number carrying the fact. One marginal
catch does not pay for a permanent suppression, so the rule is deleted and this ADR's
"cherry-picked rules" is one rule, not two.
- A new pre-commit hook, `skill-size-check` (`scripts/skill-size-check.sh`), enforces the
500-line/5,000-token `SKILL.md` ceiling, sibling to `skill-frontmatter`. Both halves of that
ceiling are blocking gates, not just the line count: `MAX_LINES=500`, and `MAX_WORDS=2770` as a
word-count proxy for the 5,000-token limit (calibrated to the densest prose this repo measured,
1.81 tokens per word, so a worst-case `SKILL.md` at the ceiling still lands under 5,000 tokens —
`wc -w` is not BPE tokenization). Either one exceeded fails the hook. Both are
inclusive: a file at exactly 500 lines or exactly 2,770 words passes, and only one past a ceiling
fails. `skill-audit/scripts/validate.sh` enforces the same pair on the same inclusive terms, so
the audit and the commit hook cannot disagree about whether a given `SKILL.md` is over size.
- `styles/KyberforgeTrial/` and `.vale.trial.ini` were deliberately not created — noted here so a
future reader doesn't wonder if a trial tier was forgotten.
- The styles-portability question — whether `styles/` and `.vale.ini` should move into
`plugins/lint/` so the prefilter also works for repos that install `kyberforge@holocron` as an
external plugin, rather than living at this repo's root — was deliberately deferred, not fixed,
in this pass. This repo-root placement remains intentional: this ADR's "File scope stays the
same" framing is specific to Kyberforge's own authoring conventions in this repo, not a generic
`lint`-plugin feature. Portability is a known limitation, tracked for a separate future session,
not silently forgotten.
**What this ADR's implementation pass did:** synced and trialed `write-good`/`alex` against the
existing SKILL.md/agent-file corpus, cherry-picked the one low-noise rule above into
`styles/Kyberforge`, wrote `scripts/skill-size-check.sh` and its pre-commit hook, fixed the
resulting corpus violations, and landed the rule changes and corpus fixes as one atomic commit —
matching the enforcement model described above (no partial or opt-in state), with every rule at
`level: error` so that model is real rather than nominal.