holocron/CONTEXT.md

name, description

name	description
AI Development Repo	The domain language of the global AI development config repository

AI Development Repo

The bounded context of this repo is how agent instructions are authored, packaged, distributed, and kept small. Terms here name concepts specific to that problem. Mechanics live elsewhere: docs/spec/architecture.md for structure, docs/spec/gates.md for enforcement, docs/adr/ for decisions.

Language

Context cost

Routing target: The skill or agent name a boundary clause sends work to. It resolves when a skill or agent of that name is reachable from the file being checked, and dangles when none is — a route the router cannot take. Dangling is a blocking ERROR in route notation (/name, → name) and a SUGGESTION for a bare name nothing else in the sentence corroborates. Verdicts and the resolution walk: docs/spec/gates.md. Avoid: route, pointer, cross-reference

Dispatch body: The body pattern a skill with two or more mutually exclusive flows must use — the body carries only the dispatch table and the gates common to every branch, and each flow lives in its own self-contained references/ file. Exemplar: apm-workflow. Avoid: router body, thin body

Hand-invoked skill: A skill reached only by typing its slash command, declared disable-model-invocation: true. The host withholds it from the model-visible listing entirely, so it costs nothing in always-on context and its description becomes human-facing text. The flag also hard-blocks the Skill tool, so no other skill can route to a hand-invoked skill — a Call `x` step in another skill's body stops working the moment x takes the flag. Check inbound routes before declaring one. Exemplar: zoom-out. Avoid: manual skill, disabled skill

Delegation discipline: The agent-side counterpart to the dispatch body. A plugin-scope agent is a single .agent.md file with no sibling references/ directory, so it cannot disclose to itself — it can only delegate to skills. Its characteristic defect is therefore restatement, not length. Avoid: agent hygiene

Distribution

Skill: A reusable slash command defined as a SKILL.md file following the Agent Skills open standard, authored at plugins/<plugin>/.apm/skills/<skill>/SKILL.md. Avoid: command, macro; and "prompt" for a skill — a Prompt is a different artifact

Prompt: A single-intent, user-triggered message with parameters, authored as plugins/<plugin>/.apm/prompts/<name>.prompt.md — the text a user would otherwise type repeatedly. It carries no procedure beyond steering existing skills or agents by name; once it holds reusable know-how, bundled files, or anything the model should find on its own, it is a Skill in the wrong container. This is a house rule, stricter than apm, which frames a prompt as a full workflow. Avoid: command (the Claude-side deployed form), workflow, macro

Instruction: A scoped rule authored as plugins/<plugin>/.apm/instructions/<name>.instructions.md, applied when the agent touches files matching its applyTo glob. Omitting applyTo makes it always-on in every session of every repo that installs the package — a legitimate way for a package to ship guidance to consumers, but a deliberate choice, never a default. A rule for this repo alone belongs in AGENTS.md, not in an instruction. Avoid: rule (the Claude-side deployed form under .claude/rules/), guideline, standard

Hook: A runtime callback a harness fires inside its own tool loop, authored as one JSON file per concern under plugins/<plugin>/.apm/hooks/ in apm's canonical shape — nested entries, PascalCase events, ${PLUGIN_ROOT} script paths — which apm renders per target. Reach is narrowed in the package's apm.yml targets:, never by filename. The last resort among apm primitives: procedure belongs in a Skill, and a hook is only for "this must always happen at this event". Avoid: trigger, callback script (the script is the hook's payload, not the hook)

apm package: The deployable unit apm builds and installs — one or more skills, agents, hooks, commands, and MCP servers under a single directory plugins/<name>/, consisting of that directory's apm.yml plus the hand-authored plugins/<name>/.apm/ tree it deploys from (ADR-0015). Avoid: bundle, module, source tree; and bare "plugin" for the installable artifact, which since ADR-0024 is an apm package and not a Claude Code plugin. "Plugin" stays correct as a modifier in the repo's settled compounds — Plugin marketplace, "plugin units", plugins/.

apm primitive: Any content type authored under plugins/<name>/.apm/ — skills, agents, hooks, instructions, and prompts. Skills and agents each have their own author skill; primitive-author covers the other three, so its name is narrower in practice than the term. factory-audit audits all five. Avoid: component, asset, artifact (unqualified); bare "primitive" when only the three non-skill, non-agent types are meant — say "hook, instruction, or prompt"

Output profile: A named ecosystem format apm pack can compile the marketplace manifest into, declared per profile under root apm.yml's marketplace.outputs:. apm defines claude and codex; each writes to its own default path unless overridden. Mechanics: docs/spec/architecture.md. Avoid: build target, export format

Plugin marketplace: A Git repository carrying a marketplace.json manifest that lists installable plugins. There is no backend, registry, or SaaS — the Git repo is the marketplace. Avoid: registry, store, catalogue

holocron: This repository, in its role as a plugin marketplace and as the remote the six plugin dependencies resolve against. Avoid: the marketplace, upstream

Provenance chain: The three-stage traceability record linking a skill back to its research inputs: /research produces topic docs and a sources.md; the author skill records which sources informed which files in references/sources.md and source_keys frontmatter; factory-audit validates the chain is complete and internally consistent. Avoid: sources, citations, attribution

Research registry: A plugin's research sources.md (e.g. plugins/git/docs/research/docs/git/sources.md), whose ## H2 headings are the source slugs. A skill's Research doc: field names exactly one, and factory-audit resolves each entry's slug against it. An entry with no registry declares Research doc: none and names what it was actually drawn from in Basis:. Avoid: bare "research doc" (the noun; Research doc: is the field name), sources file, topic doc (a topic doc is a digest of sources, not the registry)

Governance

HITL (human-in-the-loop): The agent pauses before a consequential action and a human approves before execution. Required for irreversible or high-stakes actions — architecture changes, production deployments, security configuration. Avoid: manual approval, gated action

Documents

AGENTS.md: The provider-agnostic always-on instruction file, in plain markdown with no provider-specific syntax (ADR-0003). Two exist: repo-level, and the global core/AGENTS.md deployed to ~/.agents/AGENTS.md. Avoid: instructions file, system prompt

Thin adapter: A provider-specific instruction file (CLAUDE.md, .cursor/rules/*.mdc, copilot-instructions.md) that imports its AGENTS.md and adds only that provider's syntax, carrying no original always-on content of its own (ADR-0002, ADR-0003). Avoid: wrapper, shim, provider file

LESSONS.md: The long-loop feedback log for patterns observed across sessions, at the repo root. Avoid: changelog, retro, postmortem

Quality

Skill composition: A skill calling another skill by name to delegate a sub-task — the caller owns the orchestration decision ("when to do X"), the callee owns the mechanics ("how to do X"). Avoid: chaining, nesting, sub-skill

Authoring root: The directory a gate resolves against — the nearest ancestor of the file being checked holding plugins/*/.apm/skills or plugins/*/.apm/agents, falling back to the nearest ancestor holding .git. The walk: docs/spec/gates.md. Avoid: repo root, project root

Near-miss: A query that shares keywords with this skill but needs a different one — and, by extension, the sibling that would wrongly answer it; boundary clauses exist to exclude genuine near-misses rather than to enumerate siblings. Detail: factory-audit/references/skill-description-quality.md. Avoid: overlap, similar skill

Issue: The cross-provider term for a tracked unit of work. Gitea is this repo's canonical tracker (ADR-0007), but skills say "linked issue" generically rather than naming a provider. Avoid: ticket, card, task

Family prefix: The shared first segment of a skill name (git-, gitea-, apm-, agentsmd-) marking a group of siblings. No bare skill name is a Family prefix of another: forge exists, so no skill is named forge-*, because a prefix that matches a live sibling reads as ownership rather than membership. Avoid: namespace, category

Relationships

• An apm package bundles one or more Skills and agents; a Plugin marketplace lists apm packages; holocron is this repo wearing that hat.
• AGENTS.md is the source of always-on rules; a Thin adapter imports it and originates nothing.
• Skill composition is the caller/callee split. forge routes a genuinely undecided artifact type to the matching author skill — an already-specified fix (file, line, and change known) calls that author skill directly, because each routing hop re-derives instructions from a shorter brief and has been observed to drop hard constraints handed down the chain.
• A Skill built on research carries a Provenance chain; factory-audit fails it when broken.
• LESSONS.md feeds the standing files: three or more entries on one pattern graduate the pattern into the relevant standing document.

Example dialogue

Dev: "This one only fires when someone types the slash command. Does its description still need trigger words?" Maintainer: "No — that's a hand-invoked skill. The host withholds it from the model-visible listing, so it costs nothing in always-on context and the description is human-facing text." Dev: "Then the body can be as long as it needs to be?" Maintainer: "Different budget. ADR-0020's authoring rules gate the body whether or not the skill is model-invoked — the description competes with every other skill's description, the body competes with the caller's live conversation. Four mutually exclusive flows means a dispatch body: table in SKILL.md, one references/ file per flow." Dev: "And if I split it into an agent instead?" Maintainer: "Then you're in delegation discipline territory. An agent has no references/ to disclose to, so the failure mode flips — it stops being length and starts being restatement of a procedure some skill already owns."

Flagged ambiguities

• "skill" was used for both the authored SKILL.md under plugins/<name>/.apm/skills/ and the deployed copy under .claude/skills/ — resolved: the authoring source is the Skill; the deployed copy is gitignored apm install output and is never edited.
• Skills can answer to two names, bare (gitea-prs) and namespaced (gitea:gitea-prs), depending on whether a native install exists at user scope alongside the apm one (ADR-0018) — resolved: write the bare name, which is the only form apm install produces.
• "plugin" was used both for the installable artifact under plugins/<name>/ and as a modifier in settled compounds (Plugin marketplace, "plugin units", the plugins/ directory itself) — resolved: the installable artifact is an apm package, because ADR-0024 ended native claude plugin install support and it is no longer a Claude Code plugin in any operative sense; the compounds keep the word and are not being renamed.
• "context" means both the model's live token window and the bounded domain this file describes — resolved: unqualified "context" in this repo means the token window.
• "audit" was used for both an author skill's inline closeout and the audit skill's independent clean-context recheck — resolved: these are two distinct layers, kept separate precisely because an audit running in the same context as the work it checks shares that work's blind spots. The recheck belongs to factory-audit, not to forge, which routes only to the author skills and never to an audit.
• "prompt" meant both apm's .prompt.md primitive and, loosely, any slash command or a skill — resolved: a Prompt is the .prompt.md primitive under the house rule above. apm calls a prompt "a callable program for an LLM", but on Claude it deploys as a model-invocable command with fewer frontmatter keys than a skill, and Codex receives nothing. A fat prompt is a worse skill on every harness, so the procedure goes in the skill and the prompt only steers it.