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
scripts/
Executable code bundled with this skill. Agents run scripts in this directory to perform repeatable operations rather than reinventing the logic each run.
When to add a script
Add a script when agents independently reinvent the same logic across runs — building the same parser, chart, or validation routine from scratch each time. Bundle it here once, tested and reliable.
Script requirements (agentskills.io)
Scripts must be designed for non-interactive, agentic execution:
- No interactive prompts — agents run in non-interactive shells. Accept all input via flags, env vars, or stdin. A script that blocks on TTY input hangs indefinitely.
- Expose
--help— this is how agents learn your script's interface. Keep the output concise; it enters the agent's context window. - Structured output — write data (JSON, CSV, TSV) to stdout. Write progress, warnings, and diagnostics to stderr.
- Idempotent — prefer "create if not exists" over "create and fail on duplicate". Agents may retry on failure.
- Meaningful exit codes —
0for success, non-zero for failure. Use distinct codes for different failure types; document them in--help. - Dry-run support — add
--dry-runfor destructive operations.
Self-contained scripts
Bundle dependencies inline so the agent can run the script with a single command.
Python (PEP 723 + uv):
# /// script
# dependencies = ["requests>=2.31,<3"]
# requires-python = ">=3.11"
# ///
import requests
uv run scripts/my-script.py
If no scripts are needed
Delete this README and the scripts/ directory entirely.