Defame1297
1ec3e8a1ea
skill-author still told authors to move description overflow "to the body or to README.md" while this branch deleted every per-skill README.md, every references/README.md and the README scaffold template. factory-audit's skill-file-structure.md bans non-spec files at the skill root, and the line that used to carve README out of that rule went with them. So skill-author created the file, factory-audit failed it, and nothing read it.8ce5392fixed the two scripts and missed the reference prose. The two contract.md files now differ deliberately: a skill's overflow goes to the body or a references/ file, an agent's to the body alone, because an agent is a single file with no references/ directory to disclose to. agent-description-quality.md's "the plugin's README.md" is left alone, plugin READMEs being the ones that survive. Deleting retrofit.md also dropped three instructionsbaa2f5ddid not restore with the cut list, two of which retrofit.md itself recorded as having no validator behind them: re-cite sources.md's Contributing files after content moves, since validate-provenance exits 0 on exactly that drift, and re-check a relocated gate's reachability, since a Gotcha moved into one flow's file is invisible to the others and the word counts improve either way. The third is that boundary clauses are plural — contract.md read as a cap where git-remotes carries four. Also: contract.md named an unqualified scripts/validate.sh that does not exist in skill-author, which skill-file-structure.md calls a hard error; and agent-body-and-delegation.md's simile pointed at a stale README row as the characteristic skill defect, a defect class that can no longer occur, replaced with a SKILL.md naming a references/ file that is not there. skill-author 1.0.4, agent-author 1.0.3, factory-audit 1.0.2. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NwD8Egs5r4ndqeFLmhusX2
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Description Quality Reference
Upstream source: agentskills.io — optimizing-descriptions, specification. House contract: the context budget. The house contract is narrower than the spec rather than a reinterpretation of it: where both speak, both must be satisfied.
Why the description is the expensive part
At startup an agent loads only the name and description of every installed skill. The body is
never seen until the skill triggers. The description therefore carries the entire triggering
burden and is paid for in every session, whether the skill fires or not.
A second cost is less obvious and is a correctness hazard rather than a token cost: a description that summarises the workflow is a shortcut the agent takes instead of reading the body. A measured failure upstream — a description saying "code review between tasks" — produced one review where the body's flowchart specified two.
Step 0 — establish which contract applies
Read the frontmatter before judging a single word.
disable-model-invocation: true— the skill is hand-invoked. Its description is never matched against user intent, so it is not a routing string. It carries one plain human-facing sentence stating what the skill does. Audit it for that and nothing else. Reporting a missing trigger clause, a missing boundary clause or absent indirect triggers on a hand-invoked skill is a wrong finding, not a strict one.- No such flag — the skill is model-invoked and the rest of this file applies.
The three-part shape
A model-invoked description carries exactly three things:
- Trigger clause. When to invoke, phrased imperatively:
Use when .... NotThis skill ...— the agent is deciding whether to act, not reading a catalogue entry. - At most one capability clause. What it does, in one clause. Never an enumeration.
- Boundary clause. Compressed form:
Not <thing> -> <skill-name>.The target must resolve to a real skill directory or agent file in the authoring source.validate.shchecks that deterministically and grades it by notation: an unresolved/nameor arrow target is an ERROR and reaches the report as a Structure FAIL, while an unresolved prose-form target ("useyinstead") is only a SUGGESTION unless a second target in the same sentence resolves. Take the script's tier as given and report it once, under Structure.
Everything else belongs in the body or in a references/ file.
Indirect triggers — conditional, never blanket
Add "even if the user doesn't say X" only where the user's natural phrasing genuinely omits the
domain word. True for the gitea-* family: people say "create an issue", not "create a Gitea
issue". False for git-commits: nobody asks for a commit without saying commit. A blanket
indirect-trigger clause on a skill whose domain word is unavoidable is padding charged to every
session.
Near-miss exclusions
Add a boundary clause only where a sibling skill could plausibly steal the activation. Use strong near-misses — queries that share keywords but need something different — not weak ones ("write a fibonacci function"). One boundary clause per genuine near-miss; a list of four is enumeration wearing a boundary's clothes.
Before / after
# FAIL — enumeration first, mechanics as the opener, a blanket indirect trigger,
# and 300+ characters of it preloaded into every session forever.
description: >
Analyze CSV and tabular data files — compute summary statistics, add derived
columns, generate charts, and clean messy data. Use when the user has a CSV,
TSV, or Excel file and wants to explore, transform, or visualize the data,
even if they don't explicitly mention "CSV" or "analysis."
# PASS — trigger, one capability clause, boundary. The four verbs the FAIL
# version enumerates are the body's job; the router cannot act on them.
description: >
Use when the user has a CSV, TSV, or Excel file and wants it explored,
transformed, or charted. Not schema design -> data-model.
(data-model is illustrative. In a real description the target has to resolve.)
The FAIL and SUGGESTION criteria for this dimension live in references/skill-finding-criteria.md,
which Step 3 loads on every run.