holocron/plugins/kyberforge/skills/skill-audit/README.md

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 shape checks that are not length measurements at all. Three are FAILs: every routing target named in the description — in the compressed Not <thing> -> <name> arrow and in the prose form — must resolve to a real skill or agent; every references/<file>.md the body names must exist on disk; and metadata.version must be present and three-part semver (ADR-0022). That last one is FAIL rather than SUGGESTION because the skill-frontmatter pre-commit hook rejects the file without it — an audit grading it lower would report ready-to-ship on a file the commit gate refuses. 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, metadata.version presence and semver shape (ADR-0022), 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, upstream research doc alignment, and (check 9, INFO only) whether a slug's Description or Contributing files text has changed since a base ref — --base-ref=<ref> or VALIDATE_PROVENANCE_BASE_REF, defaulting to the merge base with origin/main
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 — why the description is the expensive part, the hand-invoked (disable-model-invocation) contract, the three-part shape, when an indirect trigger is warranted, near-miss exclusions, and a before/after pair
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 on a script failure, and on any exit-0 run that printed something — validate-provenance.sh's check 9 is INFO-only, so its findings arrive that way)
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 <category>/<name>/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.