The clean provenance bill was an artifact. Checks 7 and 8 assume `Research doc:` names a source index whose H2s are slugs, but 30 of 121 corpus entries point at topic content documents whose H2s are topics. Those 30 produced every new check-7 INFO — all false positives. Check 8 aimed at the same documents, which carry no `Status:` line at all, would have emitted a large false-FAIL flood; the only thing preventing it was an unannounced `rd_status != extracted` skip. So "0 new FAILs" rested on exactly the fail-open class this branch exists to remove, and naively fixing the skip would have turned the branch red. Checks 7/8 now run only when the research doc's basename is `sources.md`, and every other case emits a visible INFO naming the slug. The dangling-path INFO stays ahead of the basename gate, because a path that does not resolve is rot whatever it is named. `parse_status` accepts the bullet form and a trailing note after the backticked value, so a status it cannot read no longer reads as "nothing to check". Corpus: 36 INFOs of which 30 were false, to 56 of which none are. FAIL stays 0, and no Status line flipped to `extracted` under the new parser, so no FAIL was suppressed by luck. Also closed, each a silent pass: a nonexistent directory, a directory with no SKILL.md, and extra arguments now exit 2; a UTF-8 BOM no longer defeats frontmatter parsing; the bare `except Exception: return False` that turned an unreadable file into a clean pass is gone, with all reads pinned to UTF-8; check 3 walks nested `references/` subdirectories; `FILL IN:` at end of line no longer escapes checks 1 and 6; duplicate `## slug` blocks and repeated `Research doc:` lines are announced rather than half-read. The agent-audit copy carried all of the above unfixed and is now ported, minus the four fixes that are genuinely N/A at agent scope — it reads a plugin-root `sources.md` and has no checks 7/8 and no `references/` tree. Its silent exit 0 for a file outside plugin scope is preserved deliberately: that is a verdict about a valid file, not a skip, and `check-scope-walkup-sync.sh` pins it. Every exit-2 gate therefore decides from the argument alone, before the walk-up runs. `validation-scripts.md` said flatly that silence from the validator is a pass, not a skip. That sentence is what made a typo'd path dangerous, and both copies are corrected here. The matching SKILL.md exit-code guidance lands with the audit rubric change, which touches the same files. Tests: skill-audit 45 to 65, agent-audit 24 to 43, every new case proven by mutation. Refs: #111, #118, #121
agent-audit
Audits an agent definition for correctness and quality against the Claude Code and Copilot agent references and the house context-budget contract (ADR-0020) — a single vendor-neutral file at plugin/APM scope, or a Claude Code and Copilot file pair at project/user scope.
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, "There is/are" sentence openers, and CC-specific "Use proactively" phrasing in a Copilot or vendor-neutral description - Reads the agent file, and its counterpart when one exists, then loads the contract for its scope
- Applies qualitative checks across description, body, delegation and comment discipline, 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
agent-author
Two things follow from ADR-0020 and are easy to get backwards. Agents take the same description
gates a skill takes — 250 characters SUGGESTION, 400 FAIL, since a name + description is
preloaded into every session either way — and no body word gate at all, because an agent body
becomes the system prompt of a fresh context rather than competing with the caller's live
conversation. Body length is judged through the delegation check instead: an agent body that
restates a procedure owned by a skill it can invoke is a FAIL, because a plugin-scope agent has no
sibling references/ directory to disclose to and can only delegate.
At plugin/APM scope the audit accepts the single .apm/agents/<name>.agent.md file — there is
no counterpart, and pair consistency does not apply. validate.sh hard-FAILs any frontmatter
field outside the vendor-neutral allowlist, since apm compile copies frontmatter verbatim to both
harnesses and an unsafe field cannot be silently dropped for just one of them. The allowlist lives
in the apm-agent-allowlist section of references/field-inventory.md, is read from there as data
by the script, and is deliberately not restated anywhere else in this skill (ADR-0009).
At project/user scope the audit accepts either file in a CC .md / Copilot .agent.md pair,
derives the counterpart automatically, and validates both, including the field-leakage checks in
each direction.
Usage
/agent-audit
Pass the path to either agent file as the argument.
Files
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
SKILL.md |
Skill instructions for agents |
assets/vale/.vale.ini |
Vale config: scopes Kyberforge to **/agents/*.md, Kyberforge+KyberforgeCopilot to **/*.agent.md |
assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/CompositionNote.yml |
Flags composition and architecture notes in a description ("cross-cutting", "entry point", "composes", "rather than duplicating") that belong in README.md |
assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/DescriptionOpener.yml |
Flags descriptions opening with "This..." instead of an imperative "Use when..." |
assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/PaddingPhrase.yml |
Flags generic "see references/ for info" pointers instead of specific file references |
assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/SentenceOpenerThereIs.yml |
Flags sentences opening with "There is/are" instead of naming the subject directly |
assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/VagueWording.yml |
Flags vague capability wording ("helps with", "utilize", "assists with", "used for") in descriptions |
assets/vale/styles/KyberforgeCopilot/ProactivePhrase.yml |
Flags CC-specific "Use proactively" phrasing with no effect in Copilot descriptions |
references/README.md |
Directory documentation for references/ |
references/description-quality.md |
Rubric for the description dimension — three-part shape, the 250/400-character budget, the hand-invoked contract, and the internal-mechanics FAIL |
references/body-and-delegation.md |
Rubric for the body, delegation and comment-discipline dimensions — the delegation FAIL and why agents take no body word gate |
references/scope-plugin-apm.md |
Scope contract for a single vendor-neutral APM agent file — allowlist, dimension routing, and the dimensions that do not apply |
references/scope-project-user.md |
Scope contract for a CC / Copilot pair — counterpart derivation, provider field rules, pair consistency |
references/validation-scripts.md |
Loaded only when a Step 1 script fails or cannot run — scope-detection walk-up, manual fallback checks, known script failures |
references/field-inventory.md |
Authoritative field lists read as data by validate.sh: valid CC and Copilot agent fields, and the vendor-neutral plugin/APM-scope allowlist |
references/sources.md |
Research provenance for skill content |
scripts/README.md |
Directory documentation for scripts/ |
scripts/validate.sh |
Structural validator — required fields, name format, placeholder detection, the ADR-0020 description budget, and the field rules for the detected scope |
scripts/validate-provenance.sh |
Provenance chain validation against sources.md at the package root (plugin/APM scope only) |
scripts/vale-wrap.sh |
Drop-in vale wrapper that works around a frontmatter-description NLP scope limitation |
tests/README.md |
(source-only) Bats test dependency and run instructions |
tests/validate.bats |
(source-only) Bats tests for validate.sh |
tests/validate-provenance.bats |
(source-only) Bats tests for validate-provenance.sh |
Rows marked (source-only) exist in the authoring source (.apm/skills/agent-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.