Files
holocron/docs/adr/0013-vale-harness-scope-and-rule-sources.md
Defame1297 44bde9e9c9 docs(adr): correct the records the branch left describing deleted things
Seven ADRs described code that no longer exists or behaviour the gates do
not have. Where the wrong text came from main it carries a dated
correction; where this branch introduced it, it is fixed in place, because
main never published it and there is no record to preserve.

Fixed in place, branch-introduced:

- ADR-0021's 2026-09-14 correction asserted apm audit --ci "was never a
  drift gate at all". It is one: it replays the install and diffs. The
  claim contradicted this branch's own AGENTS.md and gates.md.
- ADR-0015 said unconditionally that no pre-push hook needs the network.
  The guarantee holds only once apm install has populated apm_modules/.
- ADR-0014's 2026-09-16 correction said restoring .pre-commit-hooks.yaml
  would ship a hook that fails for every consumer, because their checkout
  has no lib-boundary-resolver.sh. pre-commit clones the whole hook repo
  and skill-size-check.sh resolves the library from BASH_SOURCE, so the
  hook would work.
- ADR-0019's "twelve hooks pass under unshare -rn" matched neither HEAD
  (8) nor main (14), and stated the offline guarantee unconditionally.

Corrected, inherited from main:

- ADR-0022 and ADR-0013 named skill-frontmatter's pre-commit hook as the
  enforcer of mandatory metadata.version. That hook was deleted on this
  branch; the check lives in skill-size-check.sh.
- ADR-0022 enumerated the tip rule's carve-outs as a closed list and
  described a single merge-base. The gate also exempts a tree-identical
  skill and intersects every base from merge-base --all, and emits a third
  failure form. 8cfd54f said the documented behaviour did not change; it
  did. The gate is correct and is unchanged -- the record was not.
- ADR-0020's Decision still routed description overflow to README.md, its
  ADR-0025 amendment pointed the mirrored constants at validate.sh, which
  holds none, and its Enforcement table still named the two deleted
  validate.sh paths.
- ADR-0015's Status claimed every plugin's plugin.json is pack output;
  none exist.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NwD8Egs5r4ndqeFLmhusX2
2026-09-20 18:38:00 +00:00

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10 KiB
Markdown

# Vale audit prefilter expands into a plugin-content harness, scoped to prose-pattern rules only
Issue #84 wired Vale as a deterministic prefilter for `skill-audit`/`agent-audit` (merged into
`factory-audit`'s two flows by ADR-0025; read every mention of the pair below that way), scoped to
exactly four pattern-matchable checks (imperative description opener, vague capability wording,
generic reference-pointer padding, Copilot's dead `Use proactively` phrasing), documented only in
CONTEXT.md's "Vale audit prefilter" section — never its own ADR — and explicitly excluding body
discipline, near-miss exclusion strength, and control calibration as non-goals. This ADR records a
deferred PR #85 review item to broaden that coverage, retroactively captures #84's own rationale
(since it was never recorded as a decision in its own right), and layers the expansion on top
without reversing or weakening the original four rules.
**2026-08-17 amendment.** The CONTEXT.md section named above no longer holds that documentation.
CONTEXT.md was cut back to a glossary and the prefilter's mechanics — the two-copy style layout,
`vale-wrap.sh`, the `--config` argv defect, the rule inventory, and the 0-files-means-NOT-RUN
fallback — moved to `docs/spec/gates.md`. Read that file, not CONTEXT.md, for the harness itself;
this ADR still owns the scope decision.
**File scope stays the same.** `SKILL.md` plus agent files (`**/agents/*.md`,
`**/*.agent.md`) only — matching the existing prefilter's globs. Skill-level
`README.md` files and `plugin.json` manifests are not added: README.md files are navigational, not
spec-governed content, and `plugin.json` is JSON, not prose Vale can meaningfully lint.
**Rule categories are prose-pattern-matchable only.** Structural, schema, and security concerns
stay out of this Vale-based harness because this repo already has dedicated tools for them:
`skill-frontmatter` (required frontmatter fields), `validate-marketplace`
(`claude plugin validate --strict`, schema), and `gitleaks`/`detect-private-key` (secrets).
(ADR-0024 removed the companion `validate-plugins` gate along with the per-plugin manifests it
checked, and the `skill-frontmatter` hook has since been removed as well — its required-field
checks were folded into `skill-size-check`, and the enforcer is now
`scripts/skill-size-check.sh:324-335` under the `skill-size-check` hook at
`.pre-commit-config.yaml:237`. The argument here is unaffected either way: a dedicated
non-Vale tool still owns required frontmatter fields.)
Duplicating those concerns as Vale rules would fight tools that already own them better.
**Governance docs are excluded as a rule source.** `docs/research/governance_principles/CONTROLS.md`
and `governance.md` were investigated and found to contribute nothing minable: CONTROLS.md is
org/CI-infrastructure controls (secret scanning, dependency/license scanning, agent permission
scoping, audit logging, human approval gates, periodic reviews) — none of it is a prose pattern
expressible as a Vale rule against SKILL.md/agent-file text, and what it does cover is either
already handled elsewhere (gitleaks) or genuinely out of scope for a plugin-content prose harness
(dependency/license scanning is a code-dependency concern, not skill authoring).
**Spec-derived custom rules stay mostly as-is.** Re-reading agentskills.io's
`optimizing-descriptions.md` and `skill-authoring.md`, plus `claude-code-plugins/agent-definition.md`
and `github-copilot-plugins/agent-definition.md`, found that the existing four Kyberforge rules
already cover the pattern-matchable surface those specs describe. The remaining spec guidance —
calibrating control vs. giving freedom, avoiding menus of options, coherent skill scope, moderate
detail level — is semantic judgment, already `skill-audit`'s job via LLM review (now
`factory-audit`'s skill flow, see ADR-0025), not new lintable
rules. One confirmation surfaced: Claude Code's `Use proactively` phrasing is meaningful for `.md`
agent files (it triggers auto-invocation), unlike Copilot's `.agent.md` files where it's dead
phrasing — so `KyberforgeCopilot/ProactivePhrase`'s existing `.agent.md`-only scope is correct and
must not be extended to `.md` files.
**`write-good`/`alex` are trialed, not adopted wholesale.** These built-in/third-party Vale
packages are tuned for general blog-style prose (passive voice, weasel words, wordy phrases) and
are expected to be noisy against this repo's terse, imperative instruction-file corpus. Only
individual rules proven low-noise against the existing corpus get cherry-picked into
`styles/Kyberforge`; the packages are never referenced wholesale in `BasedOnStyles`.
**A new non-Vale check closes a real gap.** `skill-authoring.md` states `SKILL.md` should stay
under 500 lines / 5,000 tokens — currently unenforced anywhere in this repo. This is a whole-file
length ceiling, not a text pattern, so it isn't a Vale rule — it becomes a new deterministic script
and pre-commit hook, sibling to the existing `skill-frontmatter` hook.
**Rules land directly in `styles/Kyberforge`, enforcing immediately.** No trial/report-only tier
is introduced (see Considered Options). "Enforcing immediately" holds only because every rule in
both styles is `level: error`: Vale's exit code keys on `error`-level alerts alone, so a
`warning`- or `suggestion`-level rule prints an alert and still exits 0, and pre-commit suppresses
output from hooks that pass — such a rule is invisible and blocks nothing. Every Vale alert is
therefore a FAIL, in the audit skills and in the blocking pre-commit hook alike, with no ignorable
tier; that matches every other gate in this repo (shellcheck, the test suite,
conventional-pre-commit). The implementation pass finalizes the cherry-picked
`write-good`/`alex` rules and any new spec-derived rule wording, runs the full set against the
existing SKILL.md/agent-file corpus, fixes any resulting violations across that corpus, and lands
the rule changes and the corpus fixes as one atomic commit — the same enforcement model as the
original four rules, never a partial or opt-in state.
## Considered options
**Phased rollout via a separate trial style + config (rejected).** A `styles/KyberforgeTrial/`
directory plus a parallel `.vale.trial.ini` (mirroring the root config's globs but with
`BasedOnStyles = Kyberforge, KyberforgeTrial`) would let new rules be swept report-only via
`lint-runner`/`vale-run` before promotion into the enforcing `styles/Kyberforge` + root
`.vale.ini`. This was considered because `BasedOnStyles = Kyberforge` activates every rule file
under that directory automatically — there's no partial/opt-in application within a style, so a
rule dropped straight into `styles/Kyberforge` goes live in the blocking pre-commit hook
immediately. Rejected in favor of finalizing rules directly and fixing violations via subagent
before committing: simpler, no new trial-config machinery to build or maintain — at the cost of no
standing report-only tier for future candidate rules. Note that the first implementation shipped
graded severities (`error`/`warning`/`suggestion`) and thereby recreated the rejected option by
accident: the five non-`error` rules never affected an exit code and never surfaced output through
a passing pre-commit hook, so they were a report-only tier that reported to nobody. Flattening
every rule to `level: error` is what actually implements this decision.
## Consequences
- `styles/Kyberforge/` gained one new rule file, cherry-picked from `write-good`/`alex` as
low-noise against this repo's corpus: `SentenceOpenerThereIs.yml` (22 hits across 273 held-out
markdown files; both in-corpus hits were clean rewrites, needing no suppression).
- A second candidate, `VagueQualifier.yml`, was cherry-picked and then dropped. Against the 41
skill/agent files it hit twice: one marginal real finding (`prototype/SKILL.md`, "very different"
→ "fundamentally different") and one false positive (`caveman/SKILL.md`, which *quotes* `of
course` as an example of filler — a mention, not a use) that no rewrite could clear, forcing the
repo's only Vale suppression comments. Of its 15 held-out hits, 9 were in `docs/research/examples/`
(out-of-scope upstream material) and the remaining 6 were the word "very" in two idioms in a
single research doc, each already adjacent to the hard number carrying the fact. One marginal
catch does not pay for a permanent suppression, so the rule is deleted and this ADR's
"cherry-picked rules" is one rule, not two.
- A new pre-commit hook, `skill-size-check` (`scripts/skill-size-check.sh`), enforces the
500-line/5,000-token `SKILL.md` ceiling, sibling to `skill-frontmatter`. Both halves of that
ceiling are blocking gates, not just the line count: `MAX_LINES=500`, and `MAX_WORDS=2770` as a
word-count proxy for the 5,000-token limit (calibrated to the densest prose this repo measured,
1.81 tokens per word, so a worst-case `SKILL.md` at the ceiling still lands under 5,000 tokens —
`wc -w` is not BPE tokenization). Either one exceeded fails the hook. Both are
inclusive: a file at exactly 500 lines or exactly 2,770 words passes, and only one past a ceiling
fails. `skill-audit/scripts/validate.sh` (now `factory-audit/scripts/validate.sh`, see ADR-0025)
enforces the same pair on the same inclusive terms, so
the audit and the commit hook cannot disagree about whether a given `SKILL.md` is over size.
- `styles/KyberforgeTrial/` and `.vale.trial.ini` were deliberately not created — noted here so a
future reader doesn't wonder if a trial tier was forgotten.
- The styles-portability question — whether `styles/` and `.vale.ini` should move into
`plugins/lint/` so the prefilter also works for repos that install `kyberforge@holocron` as an
external plugin, rather than living at this repo's root — was deliberately deferred, not fixed,
in this pass. This repo-root placement remains intentional: this ADR's "File scope stays the
same" framing is specific to Kyberforge's own authoring conventions in this repo, not a generic
`lint`-plugin feature. Portability is a known limitation, tracked for a separate future session,
not silently forgotten.
**What this ADR's implementation pass did:** synced and trialed `write-good`/`alex` against the
existing SKILL.md/agent-file corpus, cherry-picked the one low-noise rule above into
`styles/Kyberforge`, wrote `scripts/skill-size-check.sh` and its pre-commit hook, fixed the
resulting corpus violations, and landed the rule changes and corpus fixes as one atomic commit —
matching the enforcement model described above (no partial or opt-in state), with every rule at
`level: error` so that model is real rather than nominal.