Defame1297
149d564f6a
Round-3 review of PR #85 found the "enforcing" pre-commit hook enforced nothing. Vale's exit code keys on error-level alerts alone: five of the six rules were level: warning, so they exited 0, and pre-commit hides output from a passing hook — the alerts were invisible and blocked nothing. ADR-0013 rejected a report-only trial tier and then shipped one by accident. Flatten every rule to level: error. Vale's own exit code is then correct, so the hook entry drops to a bare vale-wrap.sh call and the graded error->FAIL / warning->SUGGESTION mapping disappears from both audit skills: every alert is a FAIL, in the gate and the audit alike. No ignorable tier, matching shellcheck, the test suite and conventional-pre-commit. Delete Kyberforge.VagueQualifier. Measured against the 41 skill/agent files as they stood before the rule ever ran: 2 hits. One marginal ("very different" -> "fundamentally different"), one an unfixable false positive — caveman/SKILL.md quotes "of course" as an example of filler, a mention not a use — which forced the only Vale suppression comments in the repo. Those four lines go with it; two of them were dead anyway, suppressing a frontmatter-scoped rule on a body line. Held-out prose (273 files) fired 15 times, 9 inside out-of-scope research examples and the rest one word in two idioms in a single doc. SentenceOpenerThereIs survives: 22 held-out hits, both in-corpus hits clean rewrites, zero suppressions. Widen .vale.ini's globs to [**/SKILL.md], [**/agents/*.md] and [**/*.agent.md]. The plugins/*/-prefixed globs scoped nothing — Vale's * crosses /, so they already matched docs/research/examples/**/agents/*.md and assets/templates/SKILL.md, the two paths CONTEXT.md claimed they excluded. Scoping is and was the hook's files: regex. The old globs also hid a silent false negative: a skill outside plugins/ matched no section, so Vale reported 0 files and exited 0, which both audits read as clean. They now treat a 0-file run as NOT RUN and fall back to full judgment. Also: - vale-wrap.sh resolves relative --config values and file arguments against the caller's cwd, as vale does, instead of the repo root, which hard-errored from a subdirectory and silently skipped flattening for file args that did not resolve from the root. Absolute paths inside the cwd are relativized so reports cite resolvable paths, not scratch ones. - vale-run's exit-code model was documented backwards ("exits non-zero whenever it finds an alert at or above MinAlertLevel") and would have led anyone following it to build a gate that passes everything. Its Markdown suppression syntax was MDX-only and does not suppress in .md; corrected in the skill and its troubleshooting reference, with backtick/fence exemption documented as the first resort. - skill-size-check.sh fails only above 500 lines, agreeing with skill-audit's validate.sh <= 500 pass. - ADR-0013 and CONTEXT.md amended to match, recording why graded severities cannot gate. Verified: 9 test scripts / 15 vale-wrap cases pass; vale-audit-prefilter, skill-size-check and shellcheck pass --all-files; check-manifests and claude plugin validate --strict clean. New tests fail against the old script (3 of them) and pass against the new one. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MCQ648fLSFXPHGZdQ8gn58
116 lines
8.9 KiB
Markdown
116 lines
8.9 KiB
Markdown
# Vale audit prefilter expands into a plugin-content harness, scoped to prose-pattern rules only
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Issue #84 wired Vale as a deterministic prefilter for `skill-audit`/`agent-audit`, scoped to
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exactly four pattern-matchable checks (imperative description opener, vague capability wording,
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generic reference-pointer padding, Copilot's dead `Use proactively` phrasing), documented only in
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CONTEXT.md's "Vale audit prefilter" section — never its own ADR — and explicitly excluding body
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discipline, near-miss exclusion strength, and control calibration as non-goals. This ADR records a
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deferred PR #85 review item to broaden that coverage, retroactively captures #84's own rationale
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(since it was never recorded as a decision in its own right), and layers the expansion on top
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without reversing or weakening the original four rules.
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**File scope stays the same.** `SKILL.md` plus agent files (`**/agents/*.md`,
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`**/*.agent.md`) only — matching the existing prefilter's globs. Skill-level
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`README.md` files and `plugin.json` manifests are not added: README.md files are navigational, not
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spec-governed content, and `plugin.json` is JSON, not prose Vale can meaningfully lint.
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**Rule categories are prose-pattern-matchable only.** Structural, schema, and security concerns
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stay out of this Vale-based harness because this repo already has dedicated tools for them:
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`skill-frontmatter` (required frontmatter fields), `validate-plugins`/`validate-marketplace`
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(`claude plugin validate --strict`, schema), and `gitleaks`/`detect-private-key` (secrets).
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Duplicating those concerns as Vale rules would fight tools that already own them better.
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**Governance docs are excluded as a rule source.** `docs/research/governance_principles/CONTROLS.md`
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and `governance.md` were investigated and found to contribute nothing minable: CONTROLS.md is
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org/CI-infrastructure controls (secret scanning, dependency/license scanning, agent permission
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scoping, audit logging, human approval gates, periodic reviews) — none of it is a prose pattern
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expressible as a Vale rule against SKILL.md/agent-file text, and what it does cover is either
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already handled elsewhere (gitleaks) or genuinely out of scope for a plugin-content prose harness
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(dependency/license scanning is a code-dependency concern, not skill authoring).
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**Spec-derived custom rules stay mostly as-is.** Re-reading agentskills.io's
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`optimizing-descriptions.md` and `skill-authoring.md`, plus `claude-code-plugins/agent-definition.md`
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and `github-copilot-plugins/agent-definition.md`, found that the existing four Kyberforge rules
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already cover the pattern-matchable surface those specs describe. The remaining spec guidance —
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calibrating control vs. giving freedom, avoiding menus of options, coherent skill scope, moderate
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detail level — is semantic judgment, already `skill-audit`'s job via LLM review, not new lintable
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rules. One confirmation surfaced: Claude Code's `Use proactively` phrasing is meaningful for `.md`
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agent files (it triggers auto-invocation), unlike Copilot's `.agent.md` files where it's dead
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phrasing — so `KyberforgeCopilot/ProactivePhrase`'s existing `.agent.md`-only scope is correct and
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must not be extended to `.md` files.
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**`write-good`/`alex` are trialed, not adopted wholesale.** These built-in/third-party Vale
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packages are tuned for general blog-style prose (passive voice, weasel words, wordy phrases) and
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are expected to be noisy against this repo's terse, imperative instruction-file corpus. Only
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individual rules proven low-noise against the existing corpus get cherry-picked into
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`styles/Kyberforge`; the packages are never referenced wholesale in `BasedOnStyles`.
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**A new non-Vale check closes a real gap.** `skill-authoring.md` states `SKILL.md` should stay
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under 500 lines / 5,000 tokens — currently unenforced anywhere in this repo. This is a whole-file
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length ceiling, not a text pattern, so it isn't a Vale rule — it becomes a new deterministic script
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and pre-commit hook, sibling to the existing `skill-frontmatter` hook.
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**Rules land directly in `styles/Kyberforge`, enforcing immediately.** No trial/report-only tier
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is introduced (see Considered Options). "Enforcing immediately" holds only because every rule in
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both styles is `level: error`: Vale's exit code keys on `error`-level alerts alone, so a
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`warning`- or `suggestion`-level rule prints an alert and still exits 0, and pre-commit suppresses
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output from hooks that pass — such a rule is invisible and blocks nothing. Every Vale alert is
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therefore a FAIL, in the audit skills and in the blocking pre-commit hook alike, with no ignorable
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tier; that matches every other gate in this repo (shellcheck, the test suite,
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conventional-pre-commit). The implementation pass finalizes the cherry-picked
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`write-good`/`alex` rules and any new spec-derived rule wording, runs the full set against the
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existing SKILL.md/agent-file corpus, fixes any resulting violations across that corpus, and lands
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the rule changes and the corpus fixes as one atomic commit — the same enforcement model as the
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original four rules, never a partial or opt-in state.
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## Considered options
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**Phased rollout via a separate trial style + config (rejected).** A `styles/KyberforgeTrial/`
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directory plus a parallel `.vale.trial.ini` (mirroring the root config's globs but with
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`BasedOnStyles = Kyberforge, KyberforgeTrial`) would let new rules be swept report-only via
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`lint-runner`/`vale-run` before promotion into the enforcing `styles/Kyberforge` + root
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`.vale.ini`. This was considered because `BasedOnStyles = Kyberforge` activates every rule file
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under that directory automatically — there's no partial/opt-in application within a style, so a
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rule dropped straight into `styles/Kyberforge` goes live in the blocking pre-commit hook
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immediately. Rejected in favor of finalizing rules directly and fixing violations via subagent
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before committing: simpler, no new trial-config machinery to build or maintain — at the cost of no
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standing report-only tier for future candidate rules. Note that the first implementation shipped
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graded severities (`error`/`warning`/`suggestion`) and thereby recreated the rejected option by
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accident: the five non-`error` rules never affected an exit code and never surfaced output through
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a passing pre-commit hook, so they were a report-only tier that reported to nobody. Flattening
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every rule to `level: error` is what actually implements this decision.
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## Consequences
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- `styles/Kyberforge/` gained one new rule file, cherry-picked from `write-good`/`alex` as
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low-noise against this repo's corpus: `SentenceOpenerThereIs.yml` (22 hits across 273 held-out
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markdown files; both in-corpus hits were clean rewrites, needing no suppression).
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- A second candidate, `VagueQualifier.yml`, was cherry-picked and then dropped. Against the 41
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skill/agent files it hit twice: one marginal real finding (`prototype/SKILL.md`, "very different"
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→ "fundamentally different") and one false positive (`caveman/SKILL.md`, which *quotes* `of
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course` as an example of filler — a mention, not a use) that no rewrite could clear, forcing the
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repo's only Vale suppression comments. Of its 15 held-out hits, 9 were in `docs/research/examples/`
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(out-of-scope upstream material) and the remaining 6 were the word "very" in two idioms in a
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single research doc, each already adjacent to the hard number carrying the fact. One marginal
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catch does not pay for a permanent suppression, so the rule is deleted and this ADR's
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"cherry-picked rules" is one rule, not two.
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- A new pre-commit hook, `skill-size-check` (`scripts/skill-size-check.sh`), enforces the
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500-line/5,000-token `SKILL.md` ceiling, sibling to `skill-frontmatter`. It fails only *above*
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500 lines, matching `skill-audit/scripts/validate.sh`'s long-standing `<= 500` pass.
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- `styles/KyberforgeTrial/` and `.vale.trial.ini` were deliberately not created — noted here so a
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future reader doesn't wonder if a trial tier was forgotten.
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- The styles-portability question — whether `styles/` and `.vale.ini` should move into
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`plugins/lint/` so the prefilter also works for repos that install `kyberforge@holocron` as an
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external plugin, rather than living at this repo's root — was deliberately deferred, not fixed,
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in this pass. This repo-root placement remains intentional: this ADR's "File scope stays the
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same" framing is specific to Kyberforge's own authoring conventions in this repo, not a generic
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`lint`-plugin feature. Portability is a known limitation, tracked for a separate future session,
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not silently forgotten.
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**What this ADR's implementation pass did:** synced and trialed `write-good`/`alex` against the
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existing SKILL.md/agent-file corpus, cherry-picked the one low-noise rule above into
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`styles/Kyberforge`, wrote `scripts/skill-size-check.sh` and its pre-commit hook, fixed the
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resulting corpus violations, and landed the rule changes and corpus fixes as one atomic commit —
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matching the enforcement model described above (no partial or opt-in state), with every rule at
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`level: error` so that model is real rather than nominal.
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