holocron/docs/adr/0020-skill-description-and-body-context-contract.md

# Skills and agents are authored against a context budget, not a spec ceiling

Every installed skill's `name` and `description` sits in every agent's context from the first token
of every session, whether or not the skill is ever invoked. Across this repo's 39 skills that is
23,427 characters — roughly 5,900 tokens — and the authoring rules that produced it optimised for
triggering reliability with no counter-pressure on size. This ADR sets the budget, the shape, and the
gates that hold them.

**Status: accepted (2026-08-14).**

## Context

Every `file:line` citation in this ADR is against the base commit the decision was taken on,
`f9b919d7e3bd5e6b51fbdf88b32ace0438b313e0`, not against current `HEAD`. The change that carries this
ADR rewrites several of the cited files, so a citation resolved against the worktree will land on
unrelated text. Use `git show f9b919d:<path>` to follow one.

Measured before any change, at that commit. Method, so the figures are reproducible: sum
`len(name) + len(description)` over the frontmatter of every `plugins/*/.apm/skills/*/SKILL.md`,
folding `>` block scalars to the value the host actually loads (most descriptions here are folded
scalars, so counting raw lines measures indentation instead); tokens at the standard
~4-characters-per-token approximation `scripts/skill-size-check.sh` uses. Word counts are
whitespace-separated tokens, and are stated as **body-only** or **whole-file** every time, never bare.

| | |
|---|---|
| 39 skill `name` + `description` | 23,427 chars, ~5,900 tokens, **preloaded every session** |
| 4 agent `name` + `description` | 1,325 chars, ~330 tokens, preloaded every session |
| skill bodies (body-only words) | median 684, mean 815, p90 1,349 |
| skill files (whole-file words) | median 816, mean 927, p90 1,526 |
| `MAX_WORDS` gate (`skill-audit/scripts/validate.sh:147`) | **2,770** whole-file — a density proxy, not a percentile |

That last row is worth stating plainly, because it is the first thing this ADR is about. 2,770 is not
derived from the corpus distribution at all: per the derivation comment in
`scripts/skill-size-check.sh`, it is 2,770 words at the densest observed 7.22 chars/word ≈ 20,000
chars ≈ the agentskills.io ~5,000-token ceiling. Neither percentile reaches it — 2× the body-only p90
is 2,698 and 2× the whole-file p90 is 3,052 — and reading it as "2× p90" would pair a whole-file gate
against a body-only distribution, which is exactly the conflation this ADR exists to stop.

Three findings drove this, none of which is "the descriptions drifted".

**The rules mandate the bloat.** `skill-author/SKILL.md:104` requires indirect triggers ("even if the
user doesn't mention X explicitly") and `skill-audit/references/description-quality.md:21` requires
authors to "err toward being pushy". Both are enforced. The one rule that would delete the waste —
`skill-author/SKILL.md:102`, "not the skill's internal mechanics" — is judgment-only and is absent
from the FAIL conditions at `description-quality.md:45-50`. The enforced rules inflate; the deflating
rule does not bite. The result is measurable: `gitea-files` spends 147 chars listing six verbs, then
301 chars re-quoting the same six as user phrasings, in the same order. `apm-workflow` does the same
with six capability clusters. Across the twelve longest descriptions, 30.7% is capability
enumeration and 11.6% is composition or implementation detail that cannot affect a routing decision.

**Capability enumeration in a description is a correctness hazard, not only a token cost.**
`plugins/kyberforge/docs/research/examples/skill-write/writing-skills/SKILL.md:154-158` reports a
measured failure: "when
a description summarizes the skill's workflow, an agent may follow the description instead of reading
the full skill content. A description saying 'code review between tasks' caused an agent to do ONE
review, even though the skill's flowchart clearly showed TWO reviews." `git-commits` is exactly that
shape — 74% of its description is capability enumeration, including a rules table (`header max 100
chars, lowercase subject, no trailing periods, 11 standard types`) an agent can act on without ever
loading the body.

**The upstream sources cannot settle this.** The four skill-writing references under
`plugins/kyberforge/docs/research/examples/skill-write/` disagree on what a description contains —
when-only (`writing-skills/SKILL.md:99`), what-and-when (`skill-creator/SKILL.md:67`,
`writing-skills/anthropic-best-practices.md:187`), triggers-only
(`writing-great-skills/SKILL.md:28`), and what-plus-when-plus-negative
(`write-skill/SKILL-TEMPLATE.md:5-6`). Those four paths are relative to that directory.
`writing-skills` and the Anthropic document it bundles contradict each other inside one skill
directory. They also disagree on whether
500 lines is binding, on the inline-versus-bundle threshold, and on the TOC threshold (>100 lines vs
>300 lines). "Grounded in the research" is therefore not available as a tiebreaker; a house choice is
required and this is it.

A fourth observation shaped the body half. The best progressive-disclosure ratio in the repo belongs
to `apm-workflow` — a 421-word body dispatching to 3,006 words of references — and the worst two
belong to the skills that define the house standard: `skill-author` (2,623-word body / 1,247 words of
references) and `agent-author` (2,582 / 1,664). Measured the other way, whole-file, those two are
2,760 and 2,758 words — ten and twelve words under the 2,770 gate their own plugin enforces. A
ceiling that nothing approaches is not a constraint; a ceiling that two files have grown into is a
target. The two numbers for one file are the point: 2,623 and 2,760 describe the same `skill-author`,
and only one of them is what either gate measures.

## Decision

### Descriptions

A description carries three things and nothing else: a **trigger clause**, at most one **capability
clause**, and a **boundary clause**. Capability enumeration, output-format detail, composition notes
("composes X rather than duplicating Y"), and implementation detail move to the body or to
`README.md`.

- **250 characters SUGGESTION, 400 FAIL.** The agentskills.io 1,024-character limit remains as an
  unchanged spec backstop. The SUGGESTION tier is what moves the average; the FAIL tier only stops
  outliers.
- **A missing, valueless or `null` `description:` is a hard FAIL** in all three validators. That
  reads as a trivial precondition and is not: a `description:` line with no value followed by
  `model: sonnet` 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 then early-returned on the genuinely empty folded
  value — exit 0, zero output, on a blocking pre-push gate. Presence is decided on the YAML-folded
  value and nowhere else. The field this contract is entirely about is the one field a gate must
  never fail to notice is absent.
- **Boundary clauses compress** to `Not <thing> → <skill-name>.` and must name a target that
  resolves to a real skill or agent. Resolution walks up **from the file being checked** to an
  *authoring root* — the nearest ancestor holding `plugins/*/.apm/skills` or `plugins/*/.apm/agents`,
  falling back to the nearest ancestor holding `.git`. Two passes rather than one interleaved walk,
  so a nested `.git` (a submodule, a sub-package worktree) cannot beat a real monorepo root further
  up. When an authoring root is found the universe is every skill and agent under
  `<root>/plugins/*/`, plus the target's own apm package and the packages that package declares in
  its own `apm.yml` `dependencies.apm`. Sibling plugins resolve against each other, which is what a
  monorepo means. Deployed `.claude/`/`.agents/` trees are consulted **only** when no authoring root
  exists — the consumer case, where there is no monorepo to read. What the resolver must never do is
  derive the 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. Checked
  deterministically. A description carrying **no** boundary clause at all is a SUGGESTION, for skills
  and agents alike: most descriptions want one, some genuinely have no near-miss sibling to exclude,
  and that judgment is not a script's to make.
- **The verdict must not depend on whether `apm install` has been run.** Deployed trees are
  gitignored install output, present only on a machine that has run it. Four cross-plugin targets
  here (`gitea-branches` → `git-branches`, `gitea-branches` → `git-history`, `gitea-issues` →
  `git-branches`, `gitea-workflow` → `git-workflow`) once resolved through `.claude/skills/` alone,
  so the same commit measured 2 dangling targets on a developer machine and 6 on a fresh clone. A
  gate shipping hot with no baseline cannot give two answers. Under the walk-up those four resolve
  because sibling plugins are in the universe — no plugin here declares a cross-plugin apm
  dependency, and none needs to. Verified: a tree holding only `plugins/` and the root `apm.yml`,
  with no `.claude/` or `.agents/` anywhere, now produces findings identical to the working tree —
  26 description FAILs, 9 body FAILs, 2 dangling targets, 0 missing references, 58 SUGGESTIONs.
- **The blanket pushiness rules are deleted.** `skill-author/SKILL.md:104` and
  `description-quality.md:21` are replaced by a conditional: add an indirect trigger only where the
  user's natural phrasing genuinely omits the domain word — true for the `gitea-*` family, false for
  `git-commits`. Stating the same trigger twice in two registers is a FAIL.

### Bodies

The body carries the **decision procedure only**: ordered steps, decision branches, gates, and which
reference to load when. Lookup tables, spec restatements, output schemas, templates, and rationale
prose move to `references/` behind an explicit "read X when Y" trigger.

- **600 words SUGGESTION, 900 FAIL, counted body-only** — everything after the closing `---` of the
  frontmatter. The 2,770-word / 500-line spec backstop is unchanged, keeps its existing meaning
  (conformance, not quality), and keeps counting the **whole file including frontmatter**. These are
  two different gates measuring two different things, and conflating them is what produced the
  current state.
- **Dispatch is mandatory at two or more mutually exclusive flows.** The body carries the dispatch
  table and the gates that apply to every branch; each flow lives in its own self-contained
  `references/` file. This is `apm-workflow/SKILL.md:33-41` promoted from accident to rule. "Two
  mutually exclusive flows" is not decidable from file text, so this rule is auditor judgment — see
  Enforcement below for what that means and does not mean.
- **Every `references/<file>.md` a body names must exist.** A dispatch table pointing at a file that
  was never written is a silently dead branch. Checked deterministically.
- **Gotchas are constrained.** A Gotcha must state a fact that contradicts a reasonable default —
  something the agent gets wrong by acting sensibly. More than five entries is a SUGGESTION, as is a
  Gotchas section exceeding 25% of the body; both are countable and both are checked
  deterministically. A Gotcha that paraphrases a step in the body below it is a FAIL, but a FAIL an
  auditor issues, not a script — semantic equivalence is not pattern-matchable.

### Agents

Agents take the same description gates — they are preloaded identically — and **no body word gate**.
A skill body is loaded into the caller's context, competing with the live conversation; an agent body
becomes the system prompt of a fresh context. The rationale for the 900-word FAIL does not transfer.

That exemption is expressed in `agent-audit/scripts/validate.sh`, which has no body constant, and in
the `files:` pattern of the `skill-size-check` pre-commit hook, which is `SKILL.md`-only. It is *not*
expressed in `scripts/skill-size-check.sh` itself, which measures whatever path it is handed —
running it directly over `plugins/*/.apm/agents/*.agent.md` today reports 900-word body FAILs on
`git-orchestrate` (933), `gitea-orchestrate` (1,199) and `apm-orchestrate` (1,080). Agents escape by
file pattern, not by the script knowing the difference. Anyone widening that pattern to cover agents
would silently enforce a gate this ADR declines to set.

A plugin-scope agent is a single file with no sibling `references/` directory, so it cannot disclose
to itself — it can only delegate to skills. `agent-audit` therefore gains a **delegation check**: an
agent body that restates a procedure owned by a skill it can invoke is a FAIL, with the fix being
"invoke `<skill>` instead". Length falls out of delegation rather than being gated directly.

### Invocation as a design axis

`skill-author` asks whether a skill is model-invoked or hand-invoked before writing a description. A
hand-invoked skill sets `disable-model-invocation: true` and carries one plain human-facing sentence
with no trigger list.

Verified end-to-end rather than assumed: `plugins/bin/.apm/skills/zoom-out/SKILL.md:4` carries the
flag, apm passes it through verbatim to both `.claude/skills/zoom-out/SKILL.md:4` and the flat mirror
at `plugins/bin/skills/zoom-out/SKILL.md:4`, and `zoom-out` is the one installed skill absent from
the model-visible skill listing in a live session. It remains invocable as `/zoom-out`.

### Merging siblings

Two skills that share substantial content, name each other as near-misses, and differ only in the
type of input they take should be **one skill with a dispatch table**. This catches `skill-audit` +
`agent-audit` and is scoped to them; the author pair is explicitly excluded, because
`skill-author` and `agent-author` emit genuinely different artifacts (a skill directory versus a
one-or-two-file agent pair, per ADR-0005 and ADR-0016) and their overlap is in the improve flow
rather than the core job.

**DEFERRED — not implemented in the change that carries this ADR. Tracked as issue #101.** Both
skills still exist separately, and this change made the split deeper rather than shallower: retrofit
to the dispatch pattern took `skill-audit` from 3 reference files to 7 and `agent-audit` from 4 to 8,
and their two same-named `references/description-quality.md` files now differ on 100 of ~120 lines
after normalising `skill`/`agent`, where before they were closer. The merge stays the decision; it
reopens ADR-0008 (agent-audit's single-file invocation contract) and touches every call site in
`skill-author`, `agent-author` and `forge`, which is why it is its own change and not a rider on
this one. Recorded here rather than dropped, so the gap between the rule and the tree is deliberate
and dated instead of discovered later.

### Enforcement and rollout

Gates land where the existing gates already live — no new layer. The table below is exhaustive about
which tier each rule is in, because the failure this ADR is most exposed to is a rule filed under
"Enforcement" that no validator implements:

| Check | Applies to | Tier | Home |
|---|---|---|---|
| description characters (250 SUGGESTION / 400 FAIL) | skills, agents | deterministic | `scripts/skill-size-check.sh`; constants mirrored in `skill-audit/scripts/validate.sh` and `agent-audit/scripts/validate.sh` |
| body-only words (600 SUGGESTION / 900 FAIL) | skills | deterministic | `skill-size-check.sh`, `skill-audit/scripts/validate.sh` |
| description present and non-empty (ERROR) | skills, agents | deterministic | same |
| boundary target resolves to a real skill or agent (ERROR when written as `/name` or `-> name`, or when its own sentence names another target that resolves; SUGGESTION otherwise) | skills, agents | deterministic | same |
| boundary clause absent (SUGGESTION) | skills, agents | deterministic | same |
| Gotchas entry count over five (SUGGESTION) | skills | deterministic | same |
| Gotchas over 25% of the body (SUGGESTION) | skills | deterministic | same |
| every `references/<file>.md` a body names exists (ERROR) | skills | deterministic | same |
| description opener, composition notes in a description | skills, agents | prose pattern | `plugins/kyberforge/.apm/skills/*/assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/` |
| a Gotcha paraphrasing a body step | skills | **auditor judgment** | `references/body-discipline.md` |
| dispatch at two or more mutually exclusive flows | skills | **auditor judgment** | `references/body-discipline.md` |
| delegation: an agent body restating a skill's procedure | agents | **auditor judgment** | `agent-audit` |
| capability enumeration, restatement, trigger quality | skills, agents | **auditor judgment** | `references/description-quality.md` |

The rows in bold are stated as FAILs in the Decision above and are FAILs an *auditor* issues. None of
them is countable: "does this Gotcha paraphrase step 4", "are these two flows mutually exclusive" and
"does this agent body restate what `git-commits` already owns" are semantic questions, and a script
that guessed at them would be a worse gate than no gate, because it would be believed. They are not
enforced, they are reviewed, and this table exists so that distinction is written down rather than
inferred from whether a validator happens to have been written yet.

Two of the deterministic rows are tuned for **false positives over recall**, and what they decline to
see is part of the contract. On target extraction: a bare hyphenated name counts only inside a
boundary sentence, and a single-word name is never matchable bare — `research`, `triage`, `forge`,
`prototype` and `tdd` are all real skill names *and* ordinary English, so it must be written
`` `forge` `` or `/forge` to be seen at all. Grammar then decides whether a recognised target may
raise an error: one followed by an ordinary lowercase noun is a compound **modifier**, not a route
("use pre-commit hooks instead of ad-hoc scripts", "invoke the pull-request template"), so it is
confirm-only — it still resolves and still counts as a route when the name exists, but it can never
dangle. Only a *terminal* target can. The compressed arrow form `→ <name>` is exempt from that
follower test and is always error-eligible, because nothing reads as a compound modifier after an
arrow; a `/slash` target reached through a route verb is **not** exempt and takes the same test. The
simpler rule — "only marked targets may dangle" — was available and would have been wrong here: both
live true positives are bare, `research`'s "(use neuledge-context)" and the `gitea-labels-` /
`milestones` fold. On the body-shape checks: a `## Gotchas` heading must *end* in "gotchas", not
merely contain the word, so `## Gotcha handling` and `## Why gotchas matter` are prose sections and
are skipped; fenced code blocks are masked out of heading detection and entry counting, so a fenced
example list is not mistaken for the section; and a `references/` pointer named on a line
that also says the file is gone ("removed", "deprecated", "no longer") is read as a historical
mention rather than a dead dispatch entry. Note the 25% fraction is deliberately *not* fence-masked
on either side — fenced lines are real body words, and the fraction is measured against the whole
body.

**The deterministic tier blocks immediately, with no baseline file.**

Three pre-existing contradictions are fixed in the same change, because they are the contract:

- `skill-audit/SKILL.md:58` asks whether the description opens with an action verb ("Audits…",
  "Reviews…"), while `:56` defers the same question to `Kyberforge.DescriptionOpener` and
  `skill-author/SKILL.md:101` requires an imperative "Use when…" opener. The criterion is
  unsatisfiable against the house's own skills, both of which open with "Use when".
- `DescriptionOpener.yml` is anchored to `^This (skill|agent)\b`, which misses a plain `This …`
  opener; it is widened here to `^This\b`. The anchor itself stays. Composition prose that sits
  *mid*-description — `gitea-workflow`'s "This is the human-facing entry point…" at character 377,
  `gitea-labels-milestones`'s "This is a cross-cutting shared skill…" at character 300 — was never in
  the opener rule's scope and correctly is not: under `scope: text.frontmatter.description` the `^`
  anchors to the start of the whole folded value, and un-anchoring to reach mid-description text was
  measured at 5 hits and 5 false positives and rejected (`LESSONS.md`, 2026-08-14). The real gap is
  that no rule covered that text at all, which a new token-list rule, `Kyberforge.CompositionNote`,
  closes: 10 alerts across four `gitea-*` skills, 0 false positives.
- `description-quality.md:45-50` has no FAIL condition for internal-mechanics content, which is why
  `skill-author/SKILL.md:102` never bit.

## Consequences

**Editing any non-compliant skill now requires retrofitting it first.** At decision time, 30 of 39
descriptions exceeded 400 characters and 13 of 39 bodies exceeded 900 words — the latter counted
body-only, which is what the new gate measures; the pre-existing 2,770-word gate counts the whole
file including frontmatter, and the two must not be conflated. The change that carries this ADR also
retrofits kyberforge's own four author/audit skills, so the figures on landing are **26 and 9**.
With the gate hot and no baseline, a one-line
fix to `gitea-prs` cannot be committed until that skill meets the contract. This is deliberate — it
guarantees convergence and avoids a half-state — but it means the retrofit is lazy and *mandatory*
rather than deferred. Issue #99 tracks it and should be prioritised accordingly, and the risk it
carries is the ordinary one for hot gates: a gate expensive enough to be inconvenient gets bypassed
with `SKIP=` and loses its authority.

**A second hot gate ships alongside it, and it is easy to miss.** `Kyberforge.CompositionNote` is
`level: error` like every other rule in that style, so `pre-commit run --all-files` is red on 10
alerts across `gitea-issues`, `gitea-labels-milestones`, `gitea-prs` and `gitea-workflow`
independently of anything `skill-size-check` reports. Someone scoping the #99 retrofit off the size
findings alone will fix those and still be blocked. The two gates want fixing together.

**A ceiling does not produce an average.** If every author writes to the 400-character FAIL, the
preload lands at 39 × 400 = 15,600 chars — a 33% cut off 23,427, not the ~50% intended. Writing to
the 250-character SUGGESTION instead lands at 9,750, a 58% cut. The halving depends entirely on the
250-character SUGGESTION tier being visible and respected. That tier works here in a way it does not
elsewhere in this repo: `skill-audit` already reports `PASS (N suggestions)` as a first-class
outcome. This is explicitly **not** the failure ADR-0013 records — Vale warnings are invisible
because vale's exit code keys on `error` alone, but these gates live in `validate.sh` and
`skill-audit`, where a SUGGESTION reaches the report. Realistic landing is somewhere in that 33-58%
band, not a guaranteed 50%.

**A word gate cannot detect the defect it is standing in for.** `git-commits` carries twelve Gotchas
of which four restate steps in its own Workflow (`:32` ≡ step 9, `:33` ≡ step 9, `:36` ≡ step 2,
`:31` ≡ the description). Its body is 1,102 words and its whole file 1,217, so it does fail the
900-word body FAIL — but for its length, not for the restatement. The four duplicated Gotchas are 114
words between them; delete every one and the file still fails, while a skill 250 words shorter with
the identical defect passes clean. The two properties are uncorrelated, which is why the counts are a
backstop to the dispatch rule and the Gotchas constraint — both of which are auditor judgment for the
semantic half, per the Enforcement table — and not a substitute for them. Reading the word gate as
the mechanism is the specific mistake this paragraph exists to prevent.

**Some skills legitimately need more description budget than others.** A tiered limit keyed to
sibling density was considered and rejected as too clever; the flat 250/400 pair means the `gitea-*`
and `git-*` families — where every sibling shares a keyword and boundary clauses do real routing work
— are the ones most likely to sit at the FAIL tier permanently. If the retrofit shows that family
routing degrades, the tier is the first thing to revisit.

**Four broken routing targets were found; two are fixed here and two are live.** Tracked as issue
#100.

- `skill-audit` routed to `/skill-improve` twice in its description plus `README.md:10`, and no such
  skill exists — the real target is `skill-author`. **Fixed here**, as a side effect of retrofitting
  kyberforge's own skills.
- `agent-author` said "Do not use for read-only review — examine agent files manually", routing away
  from `agent-audit`, the correct sibling. **Fixed here**, same way. Note this one was never
  detectable by the resolvable-target check and never will be: "examine agent files manually" names
  no target, and a check that resolves names cannot see a name that is absent. A misroute to nowhere
  is a review finding, not a gate finding.
- `research` routes to `neuledge-context`, which exists only inside that string. **Live.**
- `gitea-issues` carries the literal string `gitea-labels- milestones` in its folded description, a
  stray space introduced by YAML wrapping mid-token, breaking the skill name in preloaded text.
  **Live** — the check reports it as a dangling `gitea-labels`.

So the check fires on 3 of the 4 against the base commit and on 2 at the tip of this change, and
`tests/test-skill-size-check.sh` probes exactly those three by name rather than asserting a count, so
it degrades to SKIP as #100 lands rather than going stale.

**Duplication between `skill-author` and `agent-author` survives un-gated.** The merge rule
deliberately excludes the author pair, so the commit-verification argument in four near-copies, the
root-cause grouping rule in four copies, and the wholesale clone of the "Improving an existing X"
flow all remain. Cache isolation makes them structurally unavoidable
(`skill-audit/SKILL.md:95` forbids cross-skill references; `LESSONS.md:107` records why), so the
options are a sync gate or continued drift. This is an input to issue #101, which carries both halves
of the kyberforge duplication problem — the deferred audit-pair merge and this — not a solved
problem.

**Provenance frontmatter is explicitly out of scope.** `LESSONS.md:63` asserts that non-routing
frontmatter (`source_keys`, `category`, `version`) is loaded at agent startup, which would make the
7,352 characters of it across the corpus a third again on top of the description tax. Measured
against a live session on this Claude Code version, it is not: the model-visible skill listing
contains only `name` and `description`. That is host-observed rather than spec-guaranteed and says
nothing about Copilot CLI, but it is sufficient to establish that cutting `source_keys` would break
the ADR-0009 provenance machinery for no runtime gain. The metadata was added deliberately and stays.

## Alternatives considered

Upstream citations below are relative to
`plugins/kyberforge/docs/research/examples/skill-write/`, as in Context above.

- **Keep pushiness, raise the budget to ~500 chars.** Undertriggering is the worse failure mode — a
  skill that never fires is worth nothing regardless of cost — and `skill-creator/SKILL.md:67`
  explicitly recommends being "pushy" against an observed undertriggering tendency. Rejected because
  that claim is an unmeasured assertion about an older model, and because the correctness hazard in
  `writing-skills/SKILL.md:154-158` cuts the other way: a fat description is not merely expensive, it is a
  shortcut agents take instead of reading the body. Would have landed a 35% cut.
- **A trigger-eval loop to set lengths empirically.** `skill-creator/SKILL.md:337-404` specifies 20
  queries per skill, 8-10 positive and 8-10 near-miss, with a 60/40 train/test split selecting on
  test score. This is the rigorous answer and the repo has deliberately never built it. Rejected
  because it blocks the context cut behind a substantial new subsystem.
- **A repo-level aggregate preload budget** (≤12,000 chars across all skills, checked at pre-push).
  The only option that measures the actual goal rather than a proxy. Rejected because it makes one
  skill's edit fail on account of another skill's growth, and because it is meaningless for an
  external consumer installing a subset of the plugins.
- **500-word body FAIL, matching `writing-skills/SKILL.md:217-221`.** Best-grounded in upstream and
  would align this repo with the tightest source. Rejected because it fails 28 of 39 skills body-only
  (35 of 39 measured whole-file), and a blunt gate gets satisfied by deleting content rather than
  relocating it.
- **A shrinking baseline file** recording each non-compliant skill's current numbers, failing only on
  growth. Would have made the retrofit a visible burn-down instead of a wall. Rejected in favour of
  hot gates.
- **A sync gate over the duplicated spans** instead of a merge rule — generalising
  `scripts/check-vale-style-sync.sh` to cover shared prose so duplication persists but drift cannot.
  Rejected for the audit pair in favour of merging, which removes the duplication rather than
  policing it, and removes a mutually-excluding near-miss pair from the router at the same time. It
  remains the only available answer for the author pair.
- **Merging `skill-author` + `agent-author` as well**, taking kyberforge from seven skills to five.
  Largest cut available. Rejected because it reopens ADR-0005, ADR-0008 and ADR-0016 together, and a
  merged author skill would carry both the skill-directory scaffold and the dual-provider agent
  scaffold behind one dispatch.
- **Demoting Gotchas** to the end of the body or into `references/gotchas.md`, removing its
  position-based exemption from the dispatch rule. Maximum saving on the largest body construct
  (6,830 words, 21% of all body text). Rejected because a gotcha read after the mistake is worthless.