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
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106 lines
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---
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source_keys:
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- context7-websites-code-claude
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- claude-code-plugins-docs
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- claude-code-subagents-docs
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- context7-github-en-copilot
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- github-custom-agents-configuration
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---
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# Body, Delegation and Comment Discipline Reference
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Upstream source: Claude Code subagent and plugin references, GitHub Copilot custom-agents
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configuration. House contract: ADR-0020, the context budget.
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Read this when judging the **body**, **delegation** and **comment-discipline** dimensions.
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## The core test
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For every sentence in the body, ask: **"Would the agent get this wrong without this instruction?"**
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If no — cut it. The agent already knows it from general training. Adding it wastes tokens and
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dilutes the signal of what matters.
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## Agents take no body word gate
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ADR-0020 gates a skill body at 600 words SUGGESTION / 900 FAIL and deliberately gates an agent body
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at nothing. The two are not the same construct: a skill body is loaded into the caller's live
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context and competes with the conversation already there, while an agent body *becomes* the system
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prompt of a fresh context that has nothing else in it. The rationale for the 900-word ceiling does
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not transfer, so:
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- **Never report an agent body as too long on a word count.** There is no number to cite.
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- **Never add such a gate to `scripts/validate.sh`.** `tests/validate.bats` pins its absence with a
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body far past 900 words that must still pass, and adding one would contradict the ADR.
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- The one length signal that does apply is the Copilot runtime's 30,000-character body limit, which
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`validate.sh` already reports as a SUGGESTION because content past it is silently truncated.
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Length is judged through the delegation check below instead, which is the defect a word count was
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standing in for anyway.
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## The delegation check
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A plugin-scope agent is a single `.apm/agents/<name>.agent.md` file with no sibling `references/`
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directory. It cannot progressively disclose to itself — it can only delegate to skills. So a
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procedure spelled out in an agent body that a skill the agent invokes already owns is not a
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shortcut: it is a second copy of that procedure, and the second copy drifts. This is the
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characteristic agent defect, the way a stale README row is the characteristic skill defect.
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**An agent body that restates a procedure owned by a skill it can invoke is a FAIL.** The Fix is
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always the same shape: invoke `<skill>` instead.
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How to apply it: for each procedural block in the body — a rule list, a numbered sequence, a
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constraint table — ask which skill owns that procedure. If the agent names that skill anywhere (its
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dispatch table, its routing prose, its frontmatter), the block is a restatement and the skill is
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already there to be invoked.
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Worked example. The three `*-orchestrate` agents exist to compose domain skills — `git-orchestrate`
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(933 body words), `gitea-orchestrate` (1,199) and `apm-orchestrate` (1,080) — so any step they
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spell out that the composed skill already owns is the defect. `git-orchestrate:24-31` carries a
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"Hard rules" list (Conventional Commits types, atomic commits, never commit secrets, git trailers)
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that `git-commits` owns and that `git-orchestrate:44` routes to by name; `:39` concedes the point
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outright, noting the sub-skills "carry their own local copies of these rules". Two copies, one
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authority, and nothing keeping them in step.
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What is **not** a finding under this rule, because no skill owns it:
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- The dispatch table itself — which operation routes to which skill.
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- Safety gates the agent enforces before dispatching, and refusals it makes on its own authority.
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- The input contract and the structured output the agent's caller consumes.
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- Session state the agent carries across skill invocations.
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## What the body is for
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Include what the fresh context lacks:
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- A direct role instruction opening the prompt: `You are a [role]. When invoked, [action].`
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- One bounded job, stated so the agent knows what it must refuse.
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- The dispatch, gates, inputs and outputs listed above.
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- **Error handling** — what the agent does on malformed, missing or contradictory input: stop and
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report, or degrade to a named fallback. Absent it, the agent invents a recovery, and a
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subagent's invented recovery is invisible to its caller until the output is wrong.
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- Non-obvious environment facts and project-specific conventions it cannot infer.
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- One default per decision point with one escape hatch.
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Do not include at all:
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- Concepts the agent already knows (what JSON is, how HTTP works, what a CSV is)
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- Exhaustive option lists — pick a default; the agent does not benefit from choosing
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- Steps the agent handles independently — over-specifying leads to unproductive paths
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- Restatements of the description, which is already in context
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## Comment discipline
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Inspect every comment block in the YAML frontmatter and apply the core test to each: *would the
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agent get this wrong without this comment?* Template scaffolding — `# Optional. <long
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explanation>`, more than a line or two of inline guidance per field — belongs to development, not
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to a shipped file. At plugin/APM scope the stakes are higher than tidiness: `apm compile` copies
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frontmatter verbatim to every target, `<!-- ... -->` is not valid YAML, and `validate.sh` FAILs a
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frontmatter block that still contains one.
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## Where the criteria live
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Every FAIL and SUGGESTION criterion for these dimensions is in `references/finding-criteria.md`,
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which Step 3 reads on every run. This file is the reasoning behind them, loaded only when that file
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puts the body, delegation or comment-discipline dimension in play.
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