Defame1297
dac9cad912
skill-audit loaded roughly 4,268 words of rubric on every run, most of it criteria for findings a clean skill never triggers. The auditing guidance moves into finding-criteria.md, read only when a finding is actually raised, cutting a clean audit to about 999 words. The named-skill exemption is replaced with properties, so the rubric stops carrying a list that ages the moment a skill is renamed. apm-workflow's `type:` trap sat in one flow while biting several, so it is promoted to a common gate reachable from all of them; its claim to be self-contained was untrue once it started routing to apm-install. skill-author's contract had drifted from body-discipline.md and is realigned, and agent-audit's field inventory is brought in line with the same split.
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Description Quality Reference
Upstream source: agentskills.io — optimizing-descriptions, specification. House contract: ADR-0020, the context budget. The house contract is narrower than the spec rather than a reinterpretation of it: where both speak, both must be satisfied.
Why the description is the expensive part
At startup an agent loads only the name and description of every installed skill. The body is
never seen until the skill triggers. The description therefore carries the entire triggering
burden and is paid for in every session, whether the skill fires or not.
A second cost is less obvious and is a correctness hazard rather than a token cost: a description that summarises the workflow is a shortcut the agent takes instead of reading the body. A measured failure upstream — a description saying "code review between tasks" — produced one review where the body's flowchart specified two.
Step 0 — establish which contract applies
Read the frontmatter before judging a single word.
disable-model-invocation: true— the skill is hand-invoked. Its description is never matched against user intent, so it is not a routing string. It carries one plain human-facing sentence stating what the skill does. Audit it for that and nothing else. Reporting a missing trigger clause, a missing boundary clause or absent indirect triggers on a hand-invoked skill is a wrong finding, not a strict one.- No such flag — the skill is model-invoked and the rest of this file applies.
The three-part shape
A model-invoked description carries exactly three things:
- Trigger clause. When to invoke, phrased imperatively:
Use when .... NotThis skill ...— the agent is deciding whether to act, not reading a catalogue entry. - At most one capability clause. What it does, in one clause. Never an enumeration.
- Boundary clause. Compressed form:
Not <thing> -> <skill-name>.The target must resolve to a real skill directory or agent file in the authoring source;validate.shchecks that deterministically and a dangling target already surfaces as a Structure FAIL.
Everything else belongs in the body or in README.md.
Indirect triggers — conditional, never blanket
Add "even if the user doesn't say X" only where the user's natural phrasing genuinely omits the
domain word. True for the gitea-* family: people say "create an issue", not "create a Gitea
issue". False for git-commits: nobody asks for a commit without saying commit. A blanket
indirect-trigger clause on a skill whose domain word is unavoidable is padding charged to every
session.
Near-miss exclusions
Add a boundary clause only where a sibling skill could plausibly steal the activation. Use strong near-misses — queries that share keywords but need something different — not weak ones ("write a fibonacci function"). One boundary clause per genuine near-miss; a list of four is enumeration wearing a boundary's clothes.
Before / after
# FAIL — enumeration first, mechanics as the opener, a blanket indirect trigger,
# and 300+ characters of it preloaded into every session forever.
description: >
Analyze CSV and tabular data files — compute summary statistics, add derived
columns, generate charts, and clean messy data. Use when the user has a CSV,
TSV, or Excel file and wants to explore, transform, or visualize the data,
even if they don't explicitly mention "CSV" or "analysis."
# PASS — trigger, one capability clause, boundary. The four verbs the FAIL
# version enumerates are the body's job; the router cannot act on them.
description: >
Use when the user has a CSV, TSV, or Excel file and wants it explored,
transformed, or charted. Not schema design -> data-model.
(data-model is illustrative. In a real description the target has to resolve.)
The FAIL and SUGGESTION criteria for this dimension live in references/finding-criteria.md,
which Step 3 loads on every run.