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
4.4 KiB
name, description, allowed-tools, metadata
| name | description | allowed-tools | metadata | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| skill-audit | Use when the user wants a skill directory audited against the agentskills.io spec — "audit this skill", "review my SKILL.md", "is this ready to ship" — or after hand-editing a skill outside skill-author. Not applying fixes -> skill-author. | Bash Read |
|
Gotchas
- Do not narrate PASS/FAIL per check while auditing. Gather findings internally and surface them only in the Step 4 report. Narrating each check as you go is the default failure mode here.
- A skill carrying
disable-model-invocation: trueis hand-invoked — its description is never routed against, so the trigger, capability and boundary rules do not apply. Audit it as one plain human-facing sentence instead. validate.shreports two independent length families: the 500-line / 2,770-word pair counts the whole file for spec conformance, while the 250/400-character and 600/900-word pair is the house context budget and its word half counts the body only. A skill can sit inside one and fail the other — report them separately.- Vale reporting
0 filesscanned means NOT RUN, not clean. Fall back to full Step 3 judgment for every dimension it would have covered.
Step 1 — Deterministic checks
Resolve all three paths against this skill's own directory so they work from a repo checkout and an installed plugin cache alike. Run exactly:
bash scripts/validate.sh <skill-dir>
bash scripts/validate-provenance.sh <skill-dir>
scripts/vale-wrap.sh <skill-dir>/SKILL.md
validate.sh findings become the ### Structure dimension — its FAILs and its SUGGESTIONs both. If it cannot run at all (no python3, Bash denied), report that as an INFO finding rather than guessing; what it measures is not reproducible by reading.
validate-provenance.sh prints nothing on success. Its FAIL and INFO findings become a separate ### Provenance dimension, and it emits Why and Fix itself — surface those verbatim.
vale-wrap.sh applies the bundled Kyberforge style as a prefilter. Pass no --config; the wrapper locates its own. Every rule is graded error, so every alert is a FAIL. Report each one citing its rule ID, filed under the dimension it belongs to, and do not re-derive it by judgment:
| Rule | Dimension |
|---|---|
Kyberforge.DescriptionOpener, Kyberforge.CompositionNote, Kyberforge.VagueWording |
description |
Kyberforge.SentenceOpenerThereIs |
body-discipline |
Kyberforge.PaddingPhrase |
patterns |
Step 2 — Read the whole skill
Read SKILL.md, README.md, and every text file under scripts/, references/, assets/ and tests/. Skip binaries only — internal-consistency findings need the full picture.
Step 3 — Qualitative audit
Load a dimension's rubric before judging that dimension. Each is self-contained, and each is grounded in the agentskills.io specification plus the house context-budget contract (ADR-0020).
| Dimension | Read |
|---|---|
| description | references/description-quality.md |
| body-discipline | references/body-discipline.md |
| patterns | references/patterns.md |
| file-structure, internal-consistency | references/file-structure.md |
| formatting, scripts | references/formatting-and-scripts.md |
Cite file and line number for every finding.
Step 4 — Report
Open with a coverage line naming every dimension checked:
Checked: structure · description · body-discipline · patterns · file-structure · formatting · scripts · internal-consistency · provenance
Then output only the dimensions that have findings, grouped under H3 headings, FAILs before SUGGESTIONs within each. Omit clean dimensions — their absence is what confirms they passed.
Each finding:
FAIL/SUGGESTION <finding> — file:line
Why: <why this is a problem>
Fix: <exact change — quote before/after where applicable>
Close with a ## Result block holding one line: PASS, PASS (N suggestions), or FAIL (N fails · M suggestions), each optionally followed by · P info. INFO findings are observational and never change PASS/FAIL; omit · P info when there are none. Add a second line, Run skill-author to address findings., whenever there is at least one finding. Do not apply fixes — report and propose only.