Agents routinely spend turns tight-polling for a condition that was already
going to notify them — ~80 consecutive no-op turns waiting out one local:gate
run on #2250, with a completion notifier for that very process already armed.
The convention existed only in a per-user memory note, which is invisible to
anyone else and cannot be relied on mid-session.
- AGENTS.md gains a "Waiting on long-running work" section: arm a notifier and
stop; one notification is a backgrounded command or a single `until` loop, many
is a Monitor. It states the one genuine exception — state the harness cannot
observe — and says where the poll belongs in that case, inside one backgrounded
loop rather than spread across turns.
- pre-push-gate points at it where the gate is actually run.
- pr-flow §7 points at it where the Copilot review is actually waited on, with
the loop written out. The count-not-existence trap is called out: on round two
the first round's review is still there, so `-ge 1` returns immediately.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017nLLLTGc37hQiC8s3mNyhq
Signed-off-by: cliffhall <cliff@futurescale.com>
`skills:eval` was at 38/46 with several skills measuring 0-33%. The low
scores were mostly bad eval cases rather than bad descriptions, for two
reasons that were nowhere written down:
- The harness runs each case with `--max-turns 1`, so the skill has to be
the model's FIRST tool call. A prompt asking "how does X work here", or
naming a concrete file, sends the model to Read/Grep first — a better
answer to the question, scored as a miss. Every 0% case was one of these.
- `AGENTS.md` is resident on every turn, so a prompt it already answers is
answered without any skill and the case can never pass.
Replace the cases that measured the wrong thing, expand every model-invoked
skill from 3 to 5 positives (negatives kept) so one flake cannot cross the
threshold, and reshape `local-dev`'s description to the action-first form.
Add `docs/skill-authoring.md` with the case shapes that fire, the ones that
cannot, and the probe-then-measure loop.
RUNS=5 npm run skills:eval: 63/63 at or above threshold, 60 at 100%,
all 18 negatives clean.
Closes#2202
Signed-off-by: cliffhall <cliff@futurescale.com>
`disable-model-invocation: true` does not merely make a skill prefer `/name` —
the model cannot invoke it at all, and its description is absent from the skill
listing. So "create a PR for #2163", which is how that work actually starts,
could never reach `pr-flow`. The original rationale ("procedures with side
effects we'd invoke by name anyway") conflates invoking a skill, which only
loads instructions, with performing the procedure it describes.
Flipped `pr-flow`, `pre-push-gate`, `board-ops` and `test-servers` to
model-invocable. `user-invocable` is an independent axis, so this is purely
additive — every `/name` still works. `issue-create`, `issue-triage` and
`release` stay deliberate.
`board-ops` is in the set because `pr-flow` and `issue-create` delegate their
card steps to it: a pointer from a model-invocable skill to a manual-only one is
a dead end for the model.
Costs weighed: the listing share goes 1,199 → 2,256 of 4,000, and a spurious
load costs ~250 characters where a missed one costs a wrong base branch or an
unsigned commit. The rules stay resident in AGENTS.md either way — this improves
the odds of getting the procedure too, it does not become the guarantee.
Eval cases committed for all four, measured at RUNS=3: pre-push-gate, board-ops
and test-servers 5/5; pr-flow 4/5, with "take it through to a pull request" at
100% and the Copilot-review case borderline. Three initial cases were replaced
rather than tuned green: their answers are resident in AGENTS.md, so the model
answering without the skill is correct behaviour, not a miss — the rule this
file already records about what makes a valid trigger case.
AGENTS.md's maintenance rule now says to default to `false` and explains why,
so the advice this change walks back does not get re-applied.
Signed-off-by: cliffhall <cliff@futurescale.com>
- The CI wiring vouch accepted any syntactically-executable `run:`, so a step
moved into a release-only job or put behind `if: false` still reported as
wired while PR CI validated nothing. It now requires an UNCONDITIONAL step:
any `if:` on the job or the step disqualifies it, since this guard cannot
evaluate an Actions expression and "runs sometimes" is not the property being
asserted. Seven predicate cases, including the two conditional shapes and a
multi-line `run:` that must still count.
- The `local:gate` stage list now has one owner, `docs/quality-gate.md`. It had
three copies, and they drifted apart across rounds 5, 6 and 8 of this review —
which is the argument the PR itself is making, applied to itself.
Signed-off-by: cliffhall <cliff@futurescale.com>
- verify:skills:cli — the authoritative validator is now a GUARANTEED step in
`local:gate` and CI, not a best-effort hand-off. It resolves the CLI itself
(an installed one at 2.1.233+, else a pinned `npx -y`), so both tiers run the
same script and cannot drift. `verify:skills` keeps skipping when the CLI is
absent, which is right for `validate`: fast, offline, no Claude Code required.
- skill-manifest: the 1,536-char listing-entry cap covers `description` +
`when_to_use` together; checking the description alone passed an over-cap
entry. `when_to_use` is now parsed, validated and counted, with boundary tests
at 1,536/1,537.
- verify-skills: report the budget as *this repo's contribution*. The real
listing budget is shared with bundled skills and the contributor's own
~/.claude/skills, none of which is visible from here, so the number was
claiming more than it measured.
- skill-eval: a negative case now means "no skill OF THIS REPO'S fired". It
failed on any Skill invocation, so a contributor with an unrelated global
skill got a false failure about their environment rather than these skills.
- docs/architecture + local-dev: the Node backend runner gets its
`@inspector/core` alias from `clients/web/tsup.runner.config.ts`, not from
Vite. The old text sent runner work to the wrong config.
- local-dev: the tarball does not ship "only each client's build/" — the
allowlist also carries `clients/web/dist`, `clients/web/static` and the
install helper. States the invariant that actually matters instead.
- issue-triage: the test for needing triage is "no board card". Adding "and no
milestone" would skip the approved-but-unboarded case the same section then
handles. Also corrected the `$M` note: the lookup is `--state all`, so closed
issues DO have entries — `isopen` is about the invariants, not the lookup.
- issue-create: replaced "all five" with a per-version table. Steps 3 and 6
(milestone, Priority) do not exist for v1, so the old list opened with a rule
the same skill later tells you to violate.
Signed-off-by: cliffhall <cliff@futurescale.com>
Closes#2163
`AGENTS.md` was one 1,223-line contract loaded in full on every turn, whether
the task was a one-line CSS fix or a release cut. This splits it: rules stay
resident, procedures move to `.claude/skills/`.
- Ten skills under `.claude/skills/`, seven `disable-model-invocation: true`
(invoked by name only, so they cost no listing context and have no trigger
question) and three model-invoked with committed eval cases.
- `AGENTS.md` 1,223 → 380 lines: rules, a skills index, and a project tree
reduced to one line per entry. The removed recipes are not duplicated.
- `README.md` 811 → 105 lines, split into `docs/{architecture,quality-gate,
test-servers,publishing,docker}.md`, and dropped from `CLAUDE.md`'s auto-load.
- `.github/copilot-instructions.md` and its mirroring rule removed — Copilot
reads `AGENTS.md`.
- `npm run verify:skills` (in `validate`, so in `local:gate` and CI) parses each
SKILL.md the way Claude Code does, requires an explicit invocation mode and
eval cases for model-invoked skills, and budgets the listing.
- `npm run skills:eval` runs the committed trigger cases headless.
Signed-off-by: cliffhall <cliff@futurescale.com>
