Defame1297
fc305ba7d9
Five documents told authors that a prose-form dangling routing target blocks. The
gate reports it as a SUGGESTION and exits 0. Verified on fixtures: `-> name` and
`/name` are blocking ERRORs, the prose form is SUGGESTION-tier unless a second
resolving target in the same sentence corroborates it. ADR-0020 and gates.md were
right; contract.md, retrofit.md, description-quality.md, finding-criteria.md and
agent-author's contract.md were wrong — and they are what an author and an auditor
actually read. The whole 39-skill corpus was retrofitted against them.
skill-audit was also self-contradictory: it imports validate.sh's SUGGESTIONs into
the Structure dimension verbatim while its own rubric grades the same target a FAIL,
so one target got reported twice at two tiers. The script owns the grade; the rubric
now says so.
The YAML-fold trap that broke gitea-labels-milestones (#100) was warned about only
in retrofit.md, reachable only from the improve flow when a budget is exceeded. It
is now in both contract.md files, which SKILL.md mandates on the create flow too.
agent-audit loaded both rubrics unconditionally on every run — 3,323 words for a
clean audit against skill-audit's 1,636. dac9cad fixed exactly this in skill-audit
and edited agent-audit in the same commit without applying it. Same treatment: the
criteria move to a new finding-criteria.md and load per dimension. Clean run now
2,083 words, a 37% cut.
Routing: apm-workflow's description shed dependency installation while still owning
the flow, and apm-install's boundary did not exclude it, so "install my apm
dependencies" matched the CLI-binary skill with no route back. Fixed on both sides.
forge regains two of the three phrasings the retrofit deleted.
forge Step 1 called grill-with-docs unconditionally — a skill in plugins/bin, which
kyberforge does not declare as a dependency. It resolves here only because the
walk-up sweeps sibling plugins; a standalone install dead-ends. Step 1 now names
the cross-plugin dependency and gives an inline fallback. Declaring it properly in
apm.yml remains the better fix.
Also: both audit SKILL.md files now grade exit 2 as "did not run, dimension
unverified" rather than as findings; skill-audit's README row described content that
moved, which its own finding-criteria.md grades a FAIL; and body-discipline.md's
`git show <sha>:plugins/...` command is fenced, since an installed plugin cache has
no repo and file-structure.md makes a bare repo path a FAIL.
Refs: #100, #101, #125
ADR: 0020
90 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
90 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
---
|
|
source_keys:
|
|
- context7-websites-code-claude
|
|
- claude-code-subagents-docs
|
|
- context7-github-en-copilot
|
|
- github-custom-agents-configuration
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
# Agent Description Quality Reference
|
|
|
|
Upstream source: Claude Code subagent reference, GitHub Copilot custom-agents configuration.
|
|
House contract: ADR-0020, the context budget. The house contract is narrower than either
|
|
platform's schema rather than a reinterpretation of it: where both speak, both must be satisfied.
|
|
|
|
## Why the description is the expensive part
|
|
|
|
At startup an agent loads only the `name` and `description` of every installed skill and agent.
|
|
The body is never seen until the agent is invoked. The description therefore carries the entire
|
|
triggering burden **and** is paid for in every session, whether the agent fires or not.
|
|
|
|
A second cost is less obvious and is a correctness hazard rather than a token cost: a description
|
|
that summarises the workflow is a shortcut the caller takes *instead of* reading the body. A
|
|
measured failure upstream — a description saying "code review between tasks" — produced one review
|
|
where the body's flowchart specified two.
|
|
|
|
## Step 0 — establish which contract applies
|
|
|
|
Read the frontmatter before judging a single word.
|
|
|
|
- **`disable-model-invocation: true` or `user-invocable: false`** — the agent is hand-invoked. Its
|
|
description is never matched against user intent, so it is not a routing string. It carries **one
|
|
plain human-facing sentence** stating what the agent does. Audit it for that and nothing else.
|
|
Reporting a missing trigger clause, a missing boundary clause or absent indirect triggers on a
|
|
hand-invoked agent is a wrong finding, not a strict one. Both fields are Copilot-only and neither
|
|
is on the vendor-neutral APM allowlist, so this case arises in a Copilot `.agent.md` at
|
|
project/user scope and nowhere else. Its Claude Code counterpart has no equivalent field and stays
|
|
model-invoked, so the two halves of the pair carrying differently shaped descriptions is expected
|
|
there rather than a pair-consistency finding.
|
|
- **No such flag** — the agent is model-invoked and the rest of this file applies.
|
|
|
|
## The three-part shape
|
|
|
|
A model-invoked description carries exactly three things:
|
|
|
|
1. **Trigger clause.** When to invoke, phrased imperatively: `Use when ...`. Not `This agent ...` —
|
|
the caller is deciding whether to act, not reading a catalogue entry.
|
|
2. **At most one capability clause.** What it does, in one clause. Never an enumeration.
|
|
3. **Boundary clause.** Compressed form: `Not <thing> -> <skill-name>.` The target must resolve to
|
|
a real skill directory or agent file in the authoring source.
|
|
|
|
Everything else belongs in the body or in the plugin's `README.md`.
|
|
|
|
## Indirect triggers — conditional, never blanket
|
|
|
|
Add "even if the user doesn't say X" **only where the user's natural phrasing genuinely omits the
|
|
domain word.** True for the `gitea-*` family: people say "create an issue", not "create a Gitea
|
|
issue". False for `git-commits`: nobody asks for a commit without saying commit. A blanket
|
|
indirect-trigger clause on an agent whose domain word is unavoidable is padding charged to every
|
|
session.
|
|
|
|
## Near-miss exclusions
|
|
|
|
Add a boundary clause only where a sibling skill or agent could plausibly steal the activation. Use
|
|
strong near-misses — queries that share keywords but need something different — not weak ones. One
|
|
boundary clause per genuine near-miss; a list of four is enumeration wearing a boundary's clothes.
|
|
|
|
## Before / after
|
|
|
|
```yaml
|
|
# FAIL — a noun-phrase opener rather than a trigger, capability enumeration in
|
|
# place of one capability clause, and no boundary clause at all, preloaded into
|
|
# every session forever. (The live git-orchestrate description, 254 chars.)
|
|
description: Orchestrates git workflow operations for other agents. Invoke when a
|
|
caller needs a multi-step or destructive git operation (rebase, force-push, branch
|
|
deletion) coordinated across domain skills with safety gates, session context, and
|
|
structured results.
|
|
|
|
# PASS — trigger, one capability clause, boundary. The operation list and the
|
|
# safety-gate mechanics are the body's job; the router cannot act on them.
|
|
description: >
|
|
Use when an agent caller needs a multi-step or destructive git operation
|
|
dispatched and safety-gated. Not conversational git help -> git-workflow.
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
## Where the criteria live
|
|
|
|
Every FAIL and SUGGESTION criterion for this dimension is in `references/finding-criteria.md`,
|
|
which Step 3 reads on every run. This file is the reasoning behind them, loaded only when that file
|
|
puts the description dimension in play.
|