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
4.6 KiB
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
- Runs
scripts/validate.shandscripts/validate-provenance.shfor structural and provenance checks, plusscripts/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 - Reads all files in the skill directory
- Applies qualitative checks across six dimension groups, loading one rubric from
references/per group - 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, plus resolvable boundary targets).
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 length, line count, 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, and upstream research doc alignment |
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/description-quality.md |
Rubric for the description dimension — three-part shape, the 250/400-character budget, the hand-invoked (disable-model-invocation) contract, and the internal-mechanics FAIL |
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/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.