Files

Defame1297 620f20b0fd refactor(kyberforge)!: merge skill-audit and agent-audit into factory-audit

Why

The two audit skills carried 1,724 lines of byte-identical duplication: the ADR-0020 boundary
resolver (1,061), vale-wrap.sh (526), the Vale style rules (44) and the Contributing-files parser
(93). Nothing shared them — they were held in sync by a 413-line pre-push gate and its 797-line
test suite. Sync-by-gate had already failed once: at 484357a the two parser copies drifted into
different spellings of the bullet loop while a docstring asserted they were identical. That drift
was behaviour-neutral and was re-unified by hand at 598a7c3, so the copies were identical at merge
time — but nothing had caught it, and the next drift need not be neutral.

Implementation Notes

Self-containment binds BETWEEN skills, not within one. The agentskills.io spec forbids reaching
across skill directories, which is why two separate skills needed embedded copies; two files inside
ONE skill may source a third. That is the whole reason the merge removes duplication rather than
relocating it.

The union of both bodies measured 1,532 words against BODY_MAX_WORDS=900, and only 211 of those
words were shared, so SKILL.md is a dispatch body. Step 0 resolves the flow from the target path
before any validation, and its table mirrors validate.sh's detection exactly: a directory holding
SKILL.md or a SKILL.md file (skill); a *.agent.md, or a .md directly under an agents/ directory
(agent); anything else stops without running a validator. Steps 1-3 live in
references/skill-flow.md and references/agent-flow.md, and gotchas that apply to one flow live in
that flow's file, since it is loaded on every invocation anyway. If validate.sh reports on the
other artifact type, the body restarts at Step 0.

Named factory-audit rather than forge-audit because forge is a live skill, and a family prefix that
matches a live sibling reads as ownership rather than membership.

The description carries one arrow per boundary target, because ADR-0020 resolves only the first
target after an arrow. It drops the quoted "audit this skill"-style phrases, which restated
"audited" in a second register (ADR-0020's duplicate-register rule). 241 characters, Gotchas 16%
of the body: no size SUGGESTIONs.

The boundary resolver stays embedded in two files rather than imported: a cache-installed plugin
cannot read outside its own directory, and the repo-root hook resolves via .pre-commit-hooks.yaml
where entry[0] is the only token pre-commit rewrites, so no single file is reachable by both.
tests/test-adr0020-contract.sh hashes both copies for byte-identity, and asserts validate.sh sources
the resolver and that no third copy exists.

The entry scripts classify the target from its resolved parent directory, so a bare agent filename
typed inside agents/ works; resolve SCRIPT_DIR CDPATH-safely; and exit 2 when a lib-*.sh is
missing, rather than dying with exit 1, the tier the flows relay as real findings.

The provenance run functions stash their findings code in KYBERFORGE_PROV_RC and
return 0, so validate-provenance.sh calls them UNTESTED. Testing a function's
status (`f || RC=$?`) disables errexit for its entire body, and no subshell or
`set -e` inside can re-arm it once the call sits in a condition context
(measured, both spellings). Their error paths use `exit`, which is unaffected
either way; this keeps errexit armed for anything added later.

Case 0's readability guard reads the file instead of asking `[[ -r ]]`. `-r` is
access(2), which answers yes for uid 0 even on a mode-000 file, and this repo's
dev environment is root -- so the guard could never fire where it exists to fire.
A read attempt is also the stricter question, catching EIO. This is the reasoning
scripts/check-vale-style-sync.sh carried before this commit deleted it; the
hazard did not go with it.

All three entry scripts are CDPATH-safe, vale-wrap.sh included: both of its cd sites are cleared,
the --config resolution and the directory-mirror walk, where an exported CDPATH would otherwise
print a decoy path into the -print0 stream and build the mirror from the decoy's files. The two
remaining bare cd calls take absolute paths, which CDPATH is never consulted for.

Impact

BREAKING: skill-audit and agent-audit no longer exist as invocable skills. kyberforge goes to
2.0.0 (catalog 0.4.7).

Check logic is unchanged: differential runs of the old and new validators across every skill and
agent produced byte-identical stdout, stderr and exit codes, and the reconstructed Python payloads
differ only in comments and the references/field-inventory.md -> agent-field-inventory.md rename.
One doctrine governs the tiers: exit 0 is audited and clean, exit 1 is audited with findings OR a
target present but unreadable, exit 2 is that nothing was audited at all. Edge paths DID change,
deliberately (full table in ADR-0025):
- a missing target exits 2 (never ran), not 1, under its own "does not exist" message; detection is
  by path shape, so a shape-matching path that is simply absent used to reach the validator and come
  back as a FAIL against a file that never existed;
- an unshaped target exits 2 under the generic "matches neither" message, and a directory with no
  SKILL.md under a third, distinct one -- three exit-2 messages, not one;
- a dangling symlink or a symlink loop stays exit 1: it is present but broken, which is a finding
  about the artifact rather than a usage error;
- a SKILL.md file path is audited as its skill directory instead of refused;
- a .md agent outside an agents/ directory is refused rather than audited;
- a missing script library, a missing python3, a missing PyYAML, and no argument at all each exit 2.
  validate-provenance.sh already exited 2 for the last two; validate.sh now matches it.

.pre-commit-hooks.yaml is a published contract consumed by external repos. Both hook IDs and both
files: regexes are unchanged; only entry: and description: moved.

scripts/check-vale-style-sync.sh (413), scripts/sync-vale-styles.sh (21),
tests/test-check-vale-style-sync.sh (797) and agent-audit/scripts/README.md (47) are deleted. The
checker made 17 assertions: 6 compared the two Vale copies and are moot; 10 are rehomed into
tests/test-vale-wrap.sh (case 0, cases 28-31, and the suite's Vale-absent skip); and the
cross-manifest files: agreement check, which selected hooks by entry: and so could not survive both
hooks sharing one, is ported as case 33 pairing hooks by id:. Cases 28, 30 and 33 carry mutation
self-tests; narrowing the local skill prefilter to 6 of 38 SKILL.md files now fails the suite.

Skills go 39 to 38. Pre-push goes 9 repo-authored hooks to 8.

ADR: 0025
BREAKING-CHANGE: the skill-audit and agent-audit skills are removed. Both flows are served by
  factory-audit, which auto-detects whether it was handed a skill directory or an agent file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YR2CjVumUbEGWcMikcoXBD

2026-09-16 09:13:57 +00:00

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source_keys

agentskills-best-practices

agentskills-evaluating-skills

agentskills-optimizing-descriptions

Improving an existing skill

Return to SKILL.md Step 4 once Step 4 below is done — validation, versioning and commit verification are shared with the create flow and are not repeated here.

Step 1 — Verify inputs

Confirm the skill directory path exists and that at least one improvement signal is present in the conversation or a referenced file.

If the skill directory is missing, ask for it. If no signals are present, stop: "This skill applies existing signals to a skill. For a blind review without signals, use /factory-audit instead."

Signals can come from anywhere in the conversation or referenced files:

Grill session output (most common predecessor in the factory sequence)
/factory-audit findings (PASS/FAIL/SUGGESTION punch list)
Human feedback (feedback.json, inline in conversation, PR or issue comments)
Session context describing what went wrong

Also verify the name field in frontmatter matches the skill's directory name exactly.

Step 2 — Gather and group signals

Read the current skill files (SKILL.md and any files in scripts/, references/, assets/, tests/). Then collect all signals from the conversation and any file paths the user has referenced.

Group signals by root cause, not symptom. Patching per symptom is the default failure mode: three eval failures may all trace to one missing instruction. Ask: "What single gap in the skill causes this cluster of failures?" One root cause → one fix. Do not make a separate edit for each symptom.

Example:
- Session context: output format is wrong on every run
- Audit finding: no output template defined
- User feedback: "I always have to ask it to format the output"
→ Root cause: SKILL.md has no output format specification → one fix: add an output template

Step 3 — Announce planned changes

Before editing, state:

Which root causes were identified and what evidence supports each
Which files will be changed and what will change in each

Then proceed — edits are reversible via git, no approval checkpoint needed.

Step 4 — Apply changes

Edit any file in the skill directory that the signals point to: SKILL.md, scripts/, references/, assets/, tests/, README.md.

Generalize, do not patch. Find the underlying gap, not the specific example that failed. A fix scoped only to the test cases you have seen will overfit and perform worse on new inputs.

Keep it lean. Remove instructions that are not pulling their weight. For every sentence you add, ask: "Would the agent get this wrong without it?" A shorter, focused skill consistently outperforms an exhaustive one.

Explain the why. Reasoning-based instructions outperform rigid directives. If you find yourself writing a rule in all caps (ALWAYS/NEVER), reframe it: explain why the behavior matters so the agent can apply judgment in edge cases.

Retrofit before extending. Any edit to a skill that does not meet the contract has to bring it into compliance first — the gates are hot and carry no baseline file, so a one-line fix to a non-compliant skill cannot be committed until the description and body meet references/contract.md. Treat that retrofit as part of the same change, not a follow-up.

If a signal points to a script or reference file, edit that file directly rather than adding a workaround in SKILL.md.

A skill carrying no metadata.version is seeded at "1.0.0", not bumped — SKILL.md Step 4's patch bump presumes a version to bump, and ADR-0022 reserves "0.1.0" for a newly created skill.

Check for regressions before handing back. SKILL.md Step 4 tells you to resolve every FAIL, which says nothing about a check that passed before these edits and no longer does. Compare the closing audit against the skill's pre-edit state — a PASS that has become a SUGGESTION, or a SUGGESTION that has become a FAIL, is damage this flow caused and is in scope for it. Only the improve flow can make that comparison; the create flow has no prior state to compare against.

Then return to SKILL.md Step 4.

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