Skill name+description pairs are preloaded into every session, costing ~6,200 tokens across 39 skills before any skill is invoked. The authoring rules mandated that growth: skill-author:104 and description-quality.md:21 both required padding, while skill-author:102 (the deflating rule) had no FAIL condition behind it. Gates (blocking, no baseline file): - description 250 chars SUGGESTION / 400 FAIL, measured on the folded YAML value - body-only 600 words SUGGESTION / 900 FAIL, independent of the unchanged whole-file 2770-word / 500-line spec backstop - every boundary-clause routing target must resolve to a real skill or agent; catches skill-improve, neuledge-context and gitea-labels - agents take the description gates but deliberately no body gate; a test pins that absence Vale: DescriptionOpener widened to ^This\b, new CompositionNote rule banning architecture notes from descriptions. 10 hits, 0 false positives. Kyberforge's own four skills retrofitted: descriptions 3,364 -> 938 chars (-72%), bodies 8,306 -> 2,487 words (-70%), all via the apm-workflow dispatch pattern. Fixes the skill-improve dangling route and the agent-author misroute to manual review. Also fixes a pre-existing false positive where any line-initial 'read ' was flagged as interactive input, which had already caused two scripts to be rewritten around it. Refs: ADR-0020
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name, description, allowed-tools, metadata
| name | description | allowed-tools | metadata | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| agent-author | Use when the user wants to create a new agent definition file from scratch, or apply grill findings, audit findings, or inline feedback to an existing one. Not read-only review -> `agent-audit`. Not skills -> `skill-author`. | Bash Read Write Edit |
|
Gotchas
- At plugin/APM scope
toolsand every Claude-only field are omitted entirely, not merely ignored:apm compilecopies frontmatter verbatim to both harnesses, so fencing a read-only agent withtools:is wrong on one of them.disallowedToolsis the one restriction that survives (ADR-0016). - That fence is partial. It denies only the tools it names, never
Bash, which a plugin-scope agent inherits — a shell redirect still writes. State the read-only boundary in the body too. - An agent body carries no word gate; delegation replaces it. A plugin/APM agent is one file with no sibling
references/directory, so it cannot disclose to itself, only invoke skills — and a body restating a procedure an invocable skill owns is anagent-auditFAIL. - Duplicate
namevalues in one scope: Claude Code discards one silently. Verify uniqueness before shipping.
Step 1 — Dispatch
| Condition | Flow | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| No agent file at the target path(s) | Create | references/create.md |
| A file exists, at least one improvement signal present | Improve | references/improve.md |
| A file exists, no signals | Stop and ask | — |
Signals: grill output, agent-audit findings, inline feedback, session context describing what went wrong. With none, ask: "No improvement signals found. Did you mean to create a new agent, or do you have feedback to apply?"
Read only the reference for the resolved flow. Capture git log --oneline -1 before touching the filesystem; Step 4 needs it.
Step 2 — Scope
Scope decides which fields exist, so resolve it first. scripts/new-agent.sh walks up for a type:-bearing apm.yml and prints the scope it chose — read that output.
| Resolved scope | Emits | Read |
|---|---|---|
| plugin/APM | one vendor-neutral .apm/agents/<name>.agent.md |
references/plugin-scope.md |
| project or user | a Claude Code .md + Copilot .agent.md pair |
references/project-user-scope.md |
Read only the file for the resolved scope; the other describes fields this run cannot use. If precedence, cache isolation or path conventions matter, read references/deployment-modes.md.
Step 3 — Contract
Before writing or editing a description, or restructuring a body, read references/contract.md — the three-part shape, banned content, the delegation rule and the body pattern.
Gates agent-audit enforces at every scope:
- Description — a trigger clause, at most one capability clause, and a boundary clause shaped
Not <thing> -> <name>that resolves to a real skill or agent. 250 characters SUGGESTION, 400 FAIL, value only: an agent'snameanddescriptionis preloaded into every session exactly as a skill's is. - Body — no word gate, and a delegation check in its place: name the skill to invoke rather than restating what it does.
- Invocation — decide whether the agent is model-delegated or reached only by name. Only Copilot's cloud/IDE format expresses that in frontmatter (
disable-model-invocation,user-invocable).
Step 4 — Validate and close
Invoke agent-audit on each file written and resolve every FAIL before reporting done. It checks the field allowlist, name-to-stem match, leftover placeholders and template comments, the description budget and the Copilot body limit — do not hand-check those.
At plugin/APM scope bump the resolved package's apm.yml version — minor on create, patch on improve — because consumers compare it to detect updates. Project and user scope have no manifest.
Commit verification. Once the audit is clean, run git add and git commit — do not stop at staging. Re-run git log --oneline -1 and confirm the hash changed from Step 1's. A non-empty git diff --stat is not proof: staged-but-uncommitted work is part of no commit and is lost if the tree is cleaned up. Report done only once the hash has changed.