598a7c326a
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>
88 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
88 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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source_keys:
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- agentskills-spec
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- agentskills-optimizing-descriptions
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---
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# Description Quality Reference
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Upstream source: agentskills.io — optimizing-descriptions, specification.
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House contract: ADR-0020, the context budget. The house contract is narrower than the spec
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rather than a reinterpretation of it: where both speak, both must be satisfied.
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## Why the description is the expensive part
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At startup an agent loads only the `name` and `description` of every installed skill. The body is
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never seen until the skill triggers. The description therefore carries the entire triggering
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burden **and** is paid for in every session, whether the skill fires or not.
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A second cost is less obvious and is a correctness hazard rather than a token cost: a description
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that summarises the workflow is a shortcut the agent takes *instead of* reading the body. A
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measured failure upstream — a description saying "code review between tasks" — produced one review
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where the body's flowchart specified two.
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## Step 0 — establish which contract applies
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Read the frontmatter before judging a single word.
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- **`disable-model-invocation: true`** — the skill is hand-invoked. Its description is never
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matched against user intent, so it is not a routing string. It carries **one plain human-facing
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sentence** stating what the skill does. Audit it for that and nothing else. Reporting a missing
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trigger clause, a missing boundary clause or absent indirect triggers on a hand-invoked skill is
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a wrong finding, not a strict one.
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- **No such flag** — the skill is model-invoked and the rest of this file applies.
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## The three-part shape
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A model-invoked description carries exactly three things:
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1. **Trigger clause.** When to invoke, phrased imperatively: `Use when ...`. Not `This skill ...` —
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the agent is deciding whether to act, not reading a catalogue entry.
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2. **At most one capability clause.** What it does, in one clause. Never an enumeration.
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3. **Boundary clause.** Compressed form: `Not <thing> -> <skill-name>.` The target must resolve to
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a real skill directory or agent file in the authoring source. `validate.sh` checks that
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deterministically and grades it by notation: an unresolved `/name` or arrow target is an ERROR
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and reaches the report as a Structure FAIL, while an unresolved prose-form target ("use `y`
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instead") is only a SUGGESTION unless a second target in the same sentence resolves. Take the
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script's tier as given and report it once, under Structure.
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Everything else belongs in the body or in `README.md`.
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## Indirect triggers — conditional, never blanket
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Add "even if the user doesn't say X" **only where the user's natural phrasing genuinely omits the
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domain word.** True for the `gitea-*` family: people say "create an issue", not "create a Gitea
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issue". False for `git-commits`: nobody asks for a commit without saying commit. A blanket
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indirect-trigger clause on a skill whose domain word is unavoidable is padding charged to every
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session.
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## Near-miss exclusions
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Add a boundary clause only where a sibling skill could plausibly steal the activation. Use strong
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near-misses — queries that share keywords but need something different — not weak ones ("write a
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fibonacci function"). One boundary clause per genuine near-miss; a list of four is enumeration
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wearing a boundary's clothes.
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## Before / after
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```yaml
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# FAIL — enumeration first, mechanics as the opener, a blanket indirect trigger,
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# and 300+ characters of it preloaded into every session forever.
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description: >
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Analyze CSV and tabular data files — compute summary statistics, add derived
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columns, generate charts, and clean messy data. Use when the user has a CSV,
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TSV, or Excel file and wants to explore, transform, or visualize the data,
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even if they don't explicitly mention "CSV" or "analysis."
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# PASS — trigger, one capability clause, boundary. The four verbs the FAIL
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# version enumerates are the body's job; the router cannot act on them.
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description: >
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Use when the user has a CSV, TSV, or Excel file and wants it explored,
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transformed, or charted. Not schema design -> data-model.
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```
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(`data-model` is illustrative. In a real description the target has to resolve.)
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The FAIL and SUGGESTION criteria for this dimension live in `references/finding-criteria.md`,
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which Step 3 loads on every run.
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