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Defame1297 620f20b0fd refactor(kyberforge)!: merge skill-audit and agent-audit into factory-audit

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

2026-09-16 09:13:57 +00:00

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context7-websites-code-claude

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context7-github-en-copilot

github-custom-agents-configuration

Body, Delegation and Comment Discipline Reference

Upstream source: Claude Code subagent and plugin references, GitHub Copilot custom-agents configuration. House contract: the context budget.

Read this when judging the body, delegation and comment-discipline dimensions.

The core test

For every sentence in the body, ask: "Would the agent get this wrong without this instruction?"

If no — cut it. The agent already knows it from general training. Adding it wastes tokens and dilutes the signal of what matters.

Agents take no body word gate

A skill body is gated at 600 words SUGGESTION / 900 FAIL; an agent body is deliberately gated at nothing. The two are not the same construct: a skill body is loaded into the caller's live context and competes with the conversation already there, while an agent body becomes the system prompt of a fresh context that has nothing else in it. The rationale for the 900-word ceiling does not transfer, so:

Never report an agent body as too long on a word count. There is no number to cite.
Never add such a gate to scripts/validate.sh. tests/validate-agent.bats pins its absence with a body far past 900 words that must still pass, and adding one would contradict the ADR.
The one length signal that does apply is the Copilot runtime's 30,000-character body limit, which validate.sh already reports as a SUGGESTION because content past it is silently truncated.

Length is judged through the delegation check below instead, which is the defect a word count was standing in for anyway.

The delegation check

A plugin-scope agent is a single .apm/agents/<name>.agent.md file with no sibling references/ directory. It cannot progressively disclose to itself — it can only delegate to skills. So a procedure spelled out in an agent body that a skill the agent invokes already owns is not a shortcut: it is a second copy of that procedure, and the second copy drifts. This is the characteristic agent defect, the way a stale README row is the characteristic skill defect.

An agent body that restates a procedure owned by a skill it can invoke is a FAIL. The Fix is always the same shape: invoke <skill> instead.

How to apply it: for each procedural block in the body — a rule list, a numbered sequence, a constraint table — ask which skill owns that procedure. If the agent names that skill anywhere (its dispatch table, its routing prose, its frontmatter), the block is a restatement and the skill is already there to be invoked.

Worked example. The three *-orchestrate agents exist to compose domain skills — git-orchestrate (933 body words), gitea-orchestrate (1,199) and apm-orchestrate (1,080) — so any step they spell out that the composed skill already owns is the defect. git-orchestrate:24-31 carries a "Hard rules" list (Conventional Commits types, atomic commits, never commit secrets, git trailers) that git-commits owns and that git-orchestrate:44 routes to by name; :39 concedes the point outright, noting the sub-skills "carry their own local copies of these rules". Two copies, one authority, and nothing keeping them in step.

What is not a finding under this rule, because no skill owns it:

The dispatch table itself — which operation routes to which skill.
Safety gates the agent enforces before dispatching, and refusals it makes on its own authority.
The input contract and the structured output the agent's caller consumes.
Session state the agent carries across skill invocations.

What the body is for

Include what the fresh context lacks:

A direct role instruction opening the prompt: You are a [role]. When invoked, [action].
One bounded job, stated so the agent knows what it must refuse.
The dispatch, gates, inputs and outputs listed above.
Error handling — what the agent does on malformed, missing or contradictory input: stop and report, or degrade to a named fallback. Absent it, the agent invents a recovery, and a subagent's invented recovery is invisible to its caller until the output is wrong.
Non-obvious environment facts and project-specific conventions it cannot infer.
One default per decision point with one escape hatch.

Do not include at all:

Concepts the agent already knows (what JSON is, how HTTP works, what a CSV is)
Exhaustive option lists — pick a default; the agent does not benefit from choosing
Steps the agent handles independently — over-specifying leads to unproductive paths
Restatements of the description, which is already in context

Comment discipline

Inspect every comment block in the YAML frontmatter and apply the core test to each: would the agent get this wrong without this comment? Template scaffolding — # Optional. <long explanation>, more than a line or two of inline guidance per field — belongs to development, not to a shipped file. At plugin/APM scope the stakes are higher than tidiness: apm compile copies frontmatter verbatim to every target,  is not valid YAML, and validate.sh FAILs a frontmatter block that still contains one.

Where the criteria live

Every FAIL and SUGGESTION criterion for these dimensions is in references/agent-finding-criteria.md, which Step 3 reads on every run. This file is the reasoning behind them, loaded only when that file puts the body, delegation or comment-discipline dimension in play.

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