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
4.5 KiB
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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: trueoruser-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.mdat 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:
- Trigger clause. When to invoke, phrased imperatively:
Use when .... NotThis agent ...— the caller is deciding whether to act, not reading a catalogue entry. - At most one capability clause. What it does, in one clause. Never an enumeration.
- 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
# 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.