Files

Defame1297 620f20b0fd refactor(kyberforge)!: merge skill-audit and agent-audit into factory-audit

Why

The two audit skills carried 1,724 lines of byte-identical duplication: the ADR-0020 boundary
resolver (1,061), vale-wrap.sh (526), the Vale style rules (44) and the Contributing-files parser
(93). Nothing shared them — they were held in sync by a 413-line pre-push gate and its 797-line
test suite. Sync-by-gate had already failed once: at 484357a the two parser copies drifted into
different spellings of the bullet loop while a docstring asserted they were identical. That drift
was behaviour-neutral and was re-unified by hand at 598a7c3, so the copies were identical at merge
time — but nothing had caught it, and the next drift need not be neutral.

Implementation Notes

Self-containment binds BETWEEN skills, not within one. The agentskills.io spec forbids reaching
across skill directories, which is why two separate skills needed embedded copies; two files inside
ONE skill may source a third. That is the whole reason the merge removes duplication rather than
relocating it.

The union of both bodies measured 1,532 words against BODY_MAX_WORDS=900, and only 211 of those
words were shared, so SKILL.md is a dispatch body. Step 0 resolves the flow from the target path
before any validation, and its table mirrors validate.sh's detection exactly: a directory holding
SKILL.md or a SKILL.md file (skill); a *.agent.md, or a .md directly under an agents/ directory
(agent); anything else stops without running a validator. Steps 1-3 live in
references/skill-flow.md and references/agent-flow.md, and gotchas that apply to one flow live in
that flow's file, since it is loaded on every invocation anyway. If validate.sh reports on the
other artifact type, the body restarts at Step 0.

Named factory-audit rather than forge-audit because forge is a live skill, and a family prefix that
matches a live sibling reads as ownership rather than membership.

The description carries one arrow per boundary target, because ADR-0020 resolves only the first
target after an arrow. It drops the quoted "audit this skill"-style phrases, which restated
"audited" in a second register (ADR-0020's duplicate-register rule). 241 characters, Gotchas 16%
of the body: no size SUGGESTIONs.

The boundary resolver stays embedded in two files rather than imported: a cache-installed plugin
cannot read outside its own directory, and the repo-root hook resolves via .pre-commit-hooks.yaml
where entry[0] is the only token pre-commit rewrites, so no single file is reachable by both.
tests/test-adr0020-contract.sh hashes both copies for byte-identity, and asserts validate.sh sources
the resolver and that no third copy exists.

The entry scripts classify the target from its resolved parent directory, so a bare agent filename
typed inside agents/ works; resolve SCRIPT_DIR CDPATH-safely; and exit 2 when a lib-*.sh is
missing, rather than dying with exit 1, the tier the flows relay as real findings.

The provenance run functions stash their findings code in KYBERFORGE_PROV_RC and
return 0, so validate-provenance.sh calls them UNTESTED. Testing a function's
status (`f || RC=$?`) disables errexit for its entire body, and no subshell or
`set -e` inside can re-arm it once the call sits in a condition context
(measured, both spellings). Their error paths use `exit`, which is unaffected
either way; this keeps errexit armed for anything added later.

Case 0's readability guard reads the file instead of asking `[[ -r ]]`. `-r` is
access(2), which answers yes for uid 0 even on a mode-000 file, and this repo's
dev environment is root -- so the guard could never fire where it exists to fire.
A read attempt is also the stricter question, catching EIO. This is the reasoning
scripts/check-vale-style-sync.sh carried before this commit deleted it; the
hazard did not go with it.

All three entry scripts are CDPATH-safe, vale-wrap.sh included: both of its cd sites are cleared,
the --config resolution and the directory-mirror walk, where an exported CDPATH would otherwise
print a decoy path into the -print0 stream and build the mirror from the decoy's files. The two
remaining bare cd calls take absolute paths, which CDPATH is never consulted for.

Impact

BREAKING: skill-audit and agent-audit no longer exist as invocable skills. kyberforge goes to
2.0.0 (catalog 0.4.7).

Check logic is unchanged: differential runs of the old and new validators across every skill and
agent produced byte-identical stdout, stderr and exit codes, and the reconstructed Python payloads
differ only in comments and the references/field-inventory.md -> agent-field-inventory.md rename.
One doctrine governs the tiers: exit 0 is audited and clean, exit 1 is audited with findings OR a
target present but unreadable, exit 2 is that nothing was audited at all. Edge paths DID change,
deliberately (full table in ADR-0025):
- a missing target exits 2 (never ran), not 1, under its own "does not exist" message; detection is
  by path shape, so a shape-matching path that is simply absent used to reach the validator and come
  back as a FAIL against a file that never existed;
- an unshaped target exits 2 under the generic "matches neither" message, and a directory with no
  SKILL.md under a third, distinct one -- three exit-2 messages, not one;
- a dangling symlink or a symlink loop stays exit 1: it is present but broken, which is a finding
  about the artifact rather than a usage error;
- a SKILL.md file path is audited as its skill directory instead of refused;
- a .md agent outside an agents/ directory is refused rather than audited;
- a missing script library, a missing python3, a missing PyYAML, and no argument at all each exit 2.
  validate-provenance.sh already exited 2 for the last two; validate.sh now matches it.

.pre-commit-hooks.yaml is a published contract consumed by external repos. Both hook IDs and both
files: regexes are unchanged; only entry: and description: moved.

scripts/check-vale-style-sync.sh (413), scripts/sync-vale-styles.sh (21),
tests/test-check-vale-style-sync.sh (797) and agent-audit/scripts/README.md (47) are deleted. The
checker made 17 assertions: 6 compared the two Vale copies and are moot; 10 are rehomed into
tests/test-vale-wrap.sh (case 0, cases 28-31, and the suite's Vale-absent skip); and the
cross-manifest files: agreement check, which selected hooks by entry: and so could not survive both
hooks sharing one, is ported as case 33 pairing hooks by id:. Cases 28, 30 and 33 carry mutation
self-tests; narrowing the local skill prefilter to 6 of 38 SKILL.md files now fails the suite.

Skills go 39 to 38. Pre-push goes 9 repo-authored hooks to 8.

ADR: 0025
BREAKING-CHANGE: the skill-audit and agent-audit skills are removed. Both flows are served by
  factory-audit, which auto-detects whether it was handed a skill directory or an agent file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YR2CjVumUbEGWcMikcoXBD

2026-09-16 09:13:57 +00:00

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source_keys

claude-code-subagents-docs

Improving an existing agent

Return to SKILL.md Step 4 once Step 4 below is done — validation, the version bump and commit verification are shared with the create flow and are not repeated here.

Step 1 — Verify inputs

Confirm the agent file (or, at project and user scope, the pair) exists and that at least one improvement signal is present in the conversation or in a referenced file.

If no signals are present, stop: "This skill applies existing signals to an agent. For a blind review, run factory-audit instead."

factory-audit runs the validation in SKILL.md Step 4 and is co-installed with this skill; if it is unavailable, stop and ask the user to install the kyberforge plugin before continuing.

Partial pair — project and user scope only. If one provider file exists and the other does not, scaffold the missing one with bash scripts/new-agent.sh <name> <root> (file-by-file no-op) and continue. Plugin/APM scope is a single file and has no partial state.

Step 2 — Gather and group signals

Read the current file(s), then collect every signal from the conversation and from any path the user referenced.

Group signals by root cause, not by symptom. Patching per symptom is the default failure mode: three complaints often trace to one missing instruction. Ask: "What single gap in this agent causes this cluster?" One root cause, one fix.

Example:
- User feedback: the agent keeps trying to push to the remote
- Session context: no scope boundary in the system prompt
→ Root cause: the system prompt has no git scope constraint → fix: add an explicit boundary

Step 3 — Announce planned changes

Before editing, state which root causes were identified, what evidence supports each, and which files will change. Then proceed — edits are reversible via git, so no approval checkpoint is needed.

Step 4 — Apply changes

Edit whichever file the signals point to.

Generalize, do not patch. Fix the underlying gap, not the one example that failed. A fix scoped to the cases you have seen overfits and performs worse on new input.

Delegate rather than grow. An agent body has no word ceiling, but a body that restates a procedure a skill it can invoke already owns is a factory-audit FAIL. When a signal reports a missing procedure, check first whether an installed skill owns it and name that skill instead of transcribing it. See references/contract.md.

The delegation check is not a length brake — it fires only on procedure an invocable skill already owns, and says nothing about original prose. That brake is judgment, and it is the only one left: for every sentence you add, ask "would the agent get this wrong without it?" and delete it if the answer is no.

Explain the why. Reasoning-based instructions outperform rigid directives. A rule written in all caps (ALWAYS/NEVER) is usually better reframed as why the behaviour matters, so the agent can apply judgment at the edges.

Retrofit before extending. Any agent whose description does not meet the contract has to be brought into compliance before any other edit lands — the gates are hot and carry no baseline file, so a one-line fix to a non-compliant agent cannot be committed until its description meets references/contract.md. Treat that retrofit as part of the same change, not a follow-up.

Re-check the scope rules. Read the reference for the resolved scope (SKILL.md Step 2) and confirm the edit introduced no field that scope forbids, and dropped no disallowedTools fence that was already there.

If the edit adds or removes research-sourced content, update source_keys in the edited file and the matching sources.md entry — the create flow's Step 3 has the rules.

Check for regressions before handing back. SKILL.md Step 4 tells you to resolve every FAIL, which says nothing about a check that passed before these edits and no longer does. Compare the closing factory-audit against the agent's pre-edit state — a PASS that has become a SUGGESTION, or a SUGGESTION that has become a FAIL, is damage this flow caused and is in scope for it. Only the improve flow can make that comparison; the create flow has no prior state to compare against.

Then return to SKILL.md Step 4.

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