Files
holocron/plugins/kyberforge/skills/skill-audit/README.md
Defame1297 fc305ba7d9 fix(kyberforge): correct the routing-tier contract and make agent-audit rubrics conditional
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
2026-09-01 12:38:22 +00:00

6.1 KiB

skill-audit

Audit a skill directory against the agentskills.io specification and the house context-budget contract (ADR-0020). Runs structural validation then a qualitative review across description quality, body discipline, patterns, formatting, file structure, scripts, and internal consistency, plus a provenance chain check.

What it does

  1. Runs scripts/validate.sh and scripts/validate-provenance.sh for structural and provenance checks, plus scripts/vale-wrap.sh — a Vale prefilter that deterministically flags non-imperative description openers, composition and architecture notes, vague wording, padding phrases, and "There is/are" sentence openers
  2. Reads all files in the skill directory
  3. Applies qualitative checks across five dimension groups — always loading references/finding-criteria.md, then one rubric from references/ per group the criteria put in play
  4. Outputs a compact findings report — findings only, grouped by dimension, each with Why and Fix — and a result block with handoff to skill-author

validate.sh enforces two independent length families that must not be conflated: the agentskills.io spec conformance ceilings (500 lines, 2,770 words, both counting the whole file) and the ADR-0020 context budget (250/400 description characters, 600/900 body-only words).

Alongside those it runs four shape checks that are not length measurements at all. Two are FAILs: every routing target named in the description — in the compressed Not <thing> -> <name> arrow and in the prose form — must resolve to a real skill or agent, and every references/<file>.md the body names must exist on disk. Three are SUGGESTIONs: a missing boundary clause, a Gotchas section over five entries, and a Gotchas section over 25% of the body. The resolution universe for boundary targets is derived by walking up from the audited SKILL.md — the authoring root above it, its own apm package, and that package's declared apm.yml dependencies — so a fresh clone and a machine that has run apm install return the same verdict. When no universe can be determined the check prints INFO ... DID NOT RUN and does not silently pass.

Usage

/skill-audit

Provide the path to the skill directory to audit when invoking.

Files

File Purpose
SKILL.md Skill instructions for agents
scripts/validate.sh Structural validator — checks name format, name matches directory, description presence and length, body-only word count, line and whole-file word ceilings, boundary-clause presence, boundary-target resolution, references/ pointer existence, Gotchas entry count and body share, placeholder detection, script executable bit, and interactive-prompt detection
scripts/validate-provenance.sh Provenance validator — checks sources.md completeness, source_keys/slug consistency, Contributing files existence, bidirectional linkage, Research doc: fields, and upstream research doc alignment
scripts/vale-wrap.sh Vale prefilter wrapper — runs the bundled Kyberforge Vale styles against SKILL.md and reports alerts as deterministic FAILs ahead of Step 3's qualitative review
assets/vale/.vale.ini Vale configuration — points Vale at the bundled Kyberforge style path, self-located relative to vale-wrap.sh
assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/CompositionNote.yml Vale rule — flags composition and architecture notes in a description (e.g. "cross-cutting", "entry point", "rather than duplicating")
assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/DescriptionOpener.yml Vale rule — flags non-imperative "This..." description openers
assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/PaddingPhrase.yml Vale rule — flags generic "see references/" padding phrasing in conditional references
assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/SentenceOpenerThereIs.yml Vale rule — flags body sentences starting with "There is"/"There are"
assets/vale/styles/Kyberforge/VagueWording.yml Vale rule — flags known filler wording (e.g. "helps with", "utilize")
references/finding-criteria.md Every dimension's FAIL and SUGGESTION criteria — the one Step 3 file loaded on every run; it decides which rubrics below are worth loading
references/description-quality.md Rubric for the description dimension — why the description is the expensive part, the hand-invoked (disable-model-invocation) contract, the three-part shape, when an indirect trigger is warranted, near-miss exclusions, and a before/after pair
references/body-discipline.md Rubric for the body-discipline dimension — the core test, the 600/900 body-only budget against the 2,770-word whole-file backstop, the mandatory-dispatch rule, and the Gotchas constraints
references/patterns.md Rubric for the patterns dimension — which instruction construct fits which job, and how each is correctly formed
references/file-structure.md Rubric for the file-structure and internal-consistency dimensions — permitted directories, cross-plugin path rules and their two structural exemptions, README drift
references/formatting-and-scripts.md Rubric for the formatting and scripts dimensions — heading and fencing conventions, and the agentic-use criteria for bundled scripts
references/validation-scripts.md Step 1 troubleshooting — the manual structural fallback when validate.sh cannot run, and the script exit codes that are easy to misread (loaded only on a script failure)
references/sources.md Provenance record — agentskills.io sources that informed this skill and which files each contributed to
tests/validate.bats (source-only) Bats test suite for validate.sh
tests/validate-provenance.bats (source-only) Bats test suite for validate-provenance.sh
tests/README.md (source-only) Setup instructions for bats-support and bats-assert test dependencies

Rows marked (source-only) exist in the authoring source (.apm/skills/skill-audit/) but are not present in an installed plugin: scripts/sync-plugin-content.sh strips <category>/<name>/tests when it generates the flat mirror, because these are dev-time fixtures no plugin host needs to discover (ADR-0017). Run them from a repo checkout, not from an install.