Three ways the gates could report green having measured nothing. All three were
invisible to a passing test suite, because pre-commit prints nothing at all for a
hook that exits 0 — a gate that declines to check and a gate that checked and
passed produce the identical signal.
- A UTF-8 BOM, a leading blank line, a trailing space after a `---` marker or
CRLF line endings defeated the `^---\n` frontmatter matcher. Every ADR-0020
check was then skipped and the file passed: measured at the time, a
550-character description with a 1,000-word body exited 0 behind a BOM.
All four shapes are now tolerated, and frontmatter that genuinely cannot be
parsed is a hard ERROR rather than a silent skip.
- An agent file with a valueless `description:` followed by another key let a
line regex capture the *next* key, which looked non-empty, so the
missing-or-empty branch never fired and every gate below it early-returned on
the empty folded value — zero output, exit 0, on a blocking gate. The one
field this contract is entirely about was the one field a gate could fail to
notice was absent. Presence is now decided on the YAML-folded value and
nowhere else, and a missing or empty description is a hard FAIL in all three
validators.
- The hand-rolled frontmatter fallback disagreed with PyYAML across the FAIL
boundary on folded scalars, so which reader happened to be available decided
the verdict. A fallback that mis-parses a scalar shape reports a vacuous pass,
which is worse than not running, so it is deleted: python3 and PyYAML are hard
requirements that fail loudly with an install pointer.
Boundary-target resolution no longer derives its universe from its own location.
A `${BASH_SOURCE}`-relative repo root leaked this repo's 39-skill universe into
every consumer repo running the hook through pre-commit, so a consumer skill
routing to `skill-audit` resolved against a plugin it had never installed. The
interim form resolved through `.claude/` and `.agents/`, which are gitignored
`apm install` output — the same commit reported 2 dangling targets on a machine
that had run the install and 6 on a fresh clone. Resolution now walks up from the
file being checked to an authoring root (nearest ancestor holding
`plugins/*/.apm/{skills,agents}`, else the nearest `.git`, in two passes so a
nested `.git` cannot outrank a real monorepo root); the universe is every skill
and agent under `<root>/plugins/*/` plus the file's own apm package and that
package's declared `dependencies.apm`. Deployed trees are consulted only when no
authoring root exists at all — the consumer case. One commit now gets one verdict,
which a gate shipping hot with no baseline file has to.
Narrowed in the same pass: a routing target inferred from the prose boundary form
and corroborated by nothing else reports at SUGGESTION instead of blocking. A
blocking check with no escape hatch is the wrong trade when the inference from
prose is the weak part of it.
New deterministic checks, all previously untested or absent: every
`references/<file>.md` a body names must exist (ERROR — a broken pointer is not a
style opinion); a description with no boundary clause at all, a Gotchas section
over five entries, and a Gotchas section over 25% of the body are SUGGESTIONs.
Where no universe can be determined the target check prints `INFO ... DID NOT
RUN` rather than passing quietly. Each prose-scanning check needed its own
false-positive fix — a fenced example of a Gotchas section was being read as the
section itself — and those fixes are pinned rather than assumed.
The resolver is one block copied verbatim into all three scripts between
BEGIN/END markers, because a cache-installed plugin's scripts cannot read outside
their own plugin directory. Nothing asserted the copies were still identical; a
one-line edit to a single copy passed every constant-agreement assertion, since
constants are not what drifts.
Tests land here rather than in a later commit. The existing suites assert the old
behaviour and go red against these scripts, so splitting them would leave a commit
whose own `run-tests` pre-push gate fails in isolation.
Refs: ADR-0020
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.