Files
holocron/plugins/kyberforge/skills/skill-author
Claude Code AI - Gitea MCP 598a7c326a refactor(skills): retrofit the corpus to the ADR-0020 context contract (#129)
Retrofits all 39 skills to ADR-0020's description/body context contract, then fixes what six rounds of independent review found in that retrofit — including four ways the hot gate itself failed open.

Closes #99, #107, #108, #110, #111, #114, #115, #120.

## The retrofit (waves 1-5)

| | Start | Now |
|---|---|---|
| Description FAILs (>400 chars) | 26 | **0** |
| Body FAILs (>900 words, body-only) | 9 | **0** |
| Dangling routing targets | 2 | **0** |
| `Kyberforge.CompositionNote` | 10 | **0** |
| Preload tax | 21,005 chars | **~10,500** |

Under the 12,000-char success criterion. Per-wave detail is on #99.

## The review fixes

**The gate failed open four ways, three of them found after the retrofit shipped.** An unrecognised follower token made a dangling target vanish. A skill directory with no `SKILL.md` resolved as a valid target, so a commit could be green locally and red in a fresh clone — three existing fixtures were relying on that, one of which made the install-leak A/B pass vacuously. Then the free-standing `/name` sweep turned out to be gated on the sentence carrying a boundary marker, so route notation in any other sentence was invisible — not an ERROR, not a SUGGESTION, not an INFO — which left the documented "`/name` always blocks" promise false from a second direction. All four fixed and pinned.

**Two checks were silently not running.** `validate-provenance.sh` checks 7-8 were dead across nine skills. Waking them exposed a deeper problem: they assume `Research doc:` names a source index, but 30 of 121 entries point at topic content documents, so every new check-7 INFO was a false positive and check 8 was saved from a false-FAIL flood only by an *unannounced* skip. Checks 7/8 are now scoped to source indexes and every skip announces itself (#121).

**The retrofit's own anti-goal, four times.** ADR-0020 warns that a blunt gate gets satisfied by deleting content rather than relocating it. `diagnose` and `skill-audit` relocated prose and then read it unconditionally; `prototype` and `vale-config` deleted rules outright that survived nowhere. All four addressed.

## Verification

- `bash tests/run-tests.sh --strict` — 24 suites, 0 skipped, 0 failed
- `bash tests/run-bats.sh` — 325 tests, 0 failures
- `pre-commit run --all-files` — 17/17
- `pre-commit run --hook-stage pre-push --all-files` — 16/16, with `apm marketplace check` and `apm pack --check-clean` run against the remote, not skipped
- `scripts/skill-size-check.sh` over all 39 skills — rc 0, 0 ERROR/FAIL, SUGGESTION-only
- Preload tax measured at **10,498 chars**, max description 390 — both inside budget
- Every new test proven non-vacuous by a deliberate mutation of the behaviour it covers

**Per-commit sync, stated accurately:** the ten commits from the latest review round each pass `check-plugin-content-sync` in isolation, verified by checking each out in a detached worktree with a clean between. The earlier gitea window (`dfacf05..bedbd1d`, nine commits) does **not** — its mirror was regenerated in one batch at `bbc7300`. An earlier revision of this description claimed the property held for every commit; it does not, and a bisect through that window lands on a red commit. **Squash-merge** to collapse it, or accept that this range is not bisectable.

## Version bump

Six plugins and the catalog take a **patch**, not a minor. The branch is **89 commits — 40 `fix` / 30 `refactor` / 12 `docs` / 5 `chore` / 2 `test` — zero `feat`, zero `!`, zero `BREAKING CHANGE`** — and adds no skill, agent, command or hook. (Two earlier revisions of this section cited a stale histogram, most recently 78 commits; the figures above are measured at HEAD.) Both rules this repo ships (`forge/references/version-bump.md`, landing in this PR, and `git-commits/references/conventional-commits-spec.md`) make that a patch, and the catalog set is unchanged at 7 entries.

Not settled by that: four published files were removed from the installed tree, three moved, and `caveman` gained `disable-model-invocation`, retiring its old triggers. Under a strict reading those are major-class and currently ship under `refactor:` with no marker. Whether the deployed skill surface is a public contract is written down nowhere — worth deciding, but it outlives this PR.

## Deliberately not in scope

#112 (cherry-pick ownership, now resolved in favour of `git-commits`), #113 (`rtk git` normalisation), #116 (research fan-out), #101 (audit-skill merge), #122 (non-spec skill-root files), #123 (no PRD producer) stay open. #117 is the one worth reading: the contract's remedy is to move prose into `references/`, which is exactly where neither the size gate nor Vale looks — and the blind spot is wider than #117 currently records, since there is no root `.vale.ini` at all, so every ADR, `CONTEXT.md` and `README.md` is unlinted too.

That blind spot let this branch carry two `level: error` `Kyberforge.SentenceOpenerThereIs` violations into `references/` files it created — `provider-adapter-author/references/provider-matrix.md:31` and `agent-audit/references/finding-criteria.md:95`. Both are reworded in `afadaae`, confirmed by routing each file through the audit's own `vale-wrap.sh` (1 error each before, 0 after). Five further occurrences sit in `references/` files already on `main`; those are the pre-existing corpus and stay with #117, which is the real fix.

Also unfixed and not this PR's: `apm install` appends a duplicate `SessionStart` entry to `.claude/settings.json`, so a fresh clone cannot get pre-push green without an edit AGENTS.md warns against. Reproduces identically on `main`.

Co-authored-by: Defame1297 <gitea@rkdr.net>
Reviewed-on: https://git.dev.rkdr.net/Defame1297/holocron/pulls/129
Co-authored-by: Claude Code AI - Gitea MCP <claude@noreply.git.dev.rkdr.net>
Co-committed-by: Claude Code AI - Gitea MCP <claude@noreply.git.dev.rkdr.net>
2026-09-01 13:47:46 +00:00
..

skill-author

Author and refine skills conforming to the agentskills.io specification — create new skills from scratch or apply improvement signals to existing ones.

What it does

Routes to one of two flows based on context: if no skill directory exists at the target path, it scaffolds the directory from annotated templates, fills in SKILL.md and supporting files, and validates the result. If an existing skill directory and improvement signals are both present, it groups those signals by root cause and applies targeted edits, then re-validates. In both flows, bumps the skill's metadata.version when present (minor for create, patch for improve).

SKILL.md itself carries only the dispatch table, the invocation-axis decision, the contract gates and the shared close; each flow lives in its own self-contained reference file, per ADR-0020.

The contract it teaches

Authored skills are held to the ADR-0020 context budget. A description carries a trigger clause, at most one capability clause, and a boundary clause of the form Not <thing> -> <skill-name> whose target must resolve to a real skill or agent — 250 characters target, 400 hard ceiling. A body carries the decision procedure only — 600 words target, 900 hard ceiling, counting the body alone, which is a separate measurement from the 2,770-word / 500-line whole-file spec backstop. Skills with two or more mutually exclusive flows must dispatch. references/contract.md holds the full rules; assets/templates/SKILL.md encodes them as a fill-in skeleton.

Before a description is written, the skill asks whether the target is model-invoked or hand-invoked. A hand-invoked skill sets disable-model-invocation: true and carries one plain human-facing sentence with no trigger list.

Before you start

  • Run /grill-me to resolve design decisions before creating a new skill
  • Collect domain research, examples, and constraints
  • Know the skill name (kebab-case) and destination path

Placement

scripts/new-skill.sh resolves the mode automatically by walking up from the given path — see references/create.md Step 1 for the full algorithm.

Mode Path Chosen when
Standalone <path>/<name>/ No apm.yml with a top-level type: field is found walking up from <path>, before hitting .git or the filesystem root
Package (APM) <package-root>/.apm/skills/<name>/ A type-bearing apm.yml is found at or above <path> — <path> just needs to be somewhere inside the package

If the destination resolves inside an APM package, read references/deployment-modes.md — self-containment rules apply to apm compile output the same way they applied to plugin cache isolation.

Usage

/skill-author

Files

File Purpose
README.md Human-readable overview of the skill and its files
SKILL.md Skill instructions for agents
scripts/new-skill.sh Walks up from the given path to resolve package vs standalone mode, then copies annotated templates to the resolved destination
references/create.md The create flow end to end — prerequisites, package-intent gate, scaffold, frontmatter, scripts, references, sources (loaded on demand)
references/improve.md The improve flow end to end — signal verification, root-cause grouping, announcement, edits (loaded on demand)
references/contract.md The ADR-0020 description and body contract, the Gotchas constraint, the two size gates, body patterns, and org-policy embedding (loaded on demand)
references/retrofit.md Bringing a pre-ADR-0020 skill into contract — ordered cut procedure, the mutually-exclusive-flows test, reference-file conventions, the collateral checklist, and a worked description retrofit (loaded from the improve flow when a budget is exceeded)
references/deployment-modes.md APM package vs standalone differences and self-containment/cache-isolation rules (loaded on demand)
references/scripts.md Package runners, inline dependency patterns, and full script contract (loaded on demand)
references/sources.md Upstream research sources and which skill files each contributed to
assets/templates/SKILL.md Annotated SKILL.md template — emits an ADR-0020-compliant description and body skeleton
assets/templates/README.md Annotated README template for the new skill
assets/templates/scripts/README.md Placeholder for bundled scripts
assets/templates/references/README.md Placeholder for reference docs
assets/templates/references/sources.md Sources provenance template for new skills
assets/templates/assets/README.md Placeholder for static assets
assets/templates/tests/README.md Placeholder for test files
tests/new-skill.bats (source-only) Bats test suite for scripts/new-skill.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-author/) 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. The assets/templates/tests/README.md row above is not source-only — the exclusion is depth-scoped to <category>/<name>/tests, so the scaffolding template tree ships intact, which scripts/new-skill.sh depends on at runtime.

Spec reference

agentskills.io specification