Forward trace: requirement → decision → commit → gate → verification → CI on
that sha → release → closure. The distinction the skill exists for is that each
link is either checked or named as unchecked; a trace where every link is
asserted is a narrative, and narratives are what audits exist to defeat.
`trace.sh` does the mechanical part — commit, files, test files touched, release
containing it, referenced issues as URLs — and then always prints the four things
git cannot prove. The GREEN run's own accounting: "the tool did the mechanical
15%. Its real contribution is the 'Cannot verify from here' block, which is a
checklist, not an output." Kept, because it is true.
The RED run established the shape by tracing a commit by hand in sixteen steps.
Its decisive moves were reading issue COMMENTS — where the decisions actually
live — and running a probe that falsified a claim. Both are now steps.
The GREEN run then used step 5 against a gate I shipped this morning, and broke
it. It also found four things wrong with what I had written:
- The slug sed used `[^/]+?` expecting a lazy quantifier. POSIX ERE has none, so
`.git` was swallowed and every emitted evidence URL carried the suffix. It
happened to work against Gitea and would 404 on GitHub — a bad failure for the
one tool whose pitch is that an unchecked link must not look checked.
- "Prints every issue it references" was overclaimed: it greps the commit body,
so it structurally cannot find the issue that cites the COMMIT. That is the
commoner break — the issue filed afterwards that falsifies the outcome — and
it is now step 6 with the two searches that find it.
- Step 3 told you to check which job passed, and the estate's own
`workflow_run_status` returns no jobs. A step whose tooling dead-ends is where
a trace becomes "the run was green"; the REST fallback is now written out.
- The output format did not survive contact. It grew four slots, each forced by
a real trace: two requirements differing in kind (a defect report and a
standing bar), the gate as an artifact separate from the test, the RED/GREEN
baseline against the parent, and the commit's factual claims checked. Without
the last one, "commit → verified" means only "this sha exists".
Also: `git describe --contains` reads local tags, so the tool now says so on
every hit rather than only when it finds nothing.
Closes#10
Bump-Type: minor
Codifies cad's ADR template (frontmatter + Status/Context/Decision/Consequences/
Validation) and formalises the productive-tensions pattern that ADR-0001 already
does informally under "Known refinements, deliberately not built yet".
The RED run is why the skill is shaped this way. An unaided agent given a
genuinely-undecidable transport choice produced a strong ADR — it invented a
"Cost of reversal" section, wrote concrete revisit triggers, and reframed the
unanswerable question ("which is better?") into an answerable one ("which
option's correctness depends on the unsettled variables?"). So the reasoning was
not the gap. What it could not guess was the house format: it invented a bullet
header instead of the frontmatter that makes the corpus greppable, and it wrote
no Validation section at all.
The GREEN run then found eleven problems. Four mattered:
- **The Overview contradicted the Escalation section in its first sentence** —
"An ADR is not documentation of a decision. It is the decision" against
"decides nothing". Escalation is right; the flourish is gone.
- **The escalation clause trapped every agent-authored ADR.** The deciders are
never the agent, so `proposed` is mandatory — and the skill separately called
a lingering `proposed` a failure mode. Now: a `proposed` ADR with a named
decider is waiting on a person and gets chased; one without is waiting on
nobody. Naming that person is the deliverable, not a formality.
- **No filename or path convention, in a skill whose thesis is greppability.**
Called "the biggest hole in the skill", correctly. Now docs/adr/NNNN-slug.md,
with the cross-repo caveat that a bare number is ambiguous between repos.
- **"Pick the option whose correctness does not depend on the unknown" assumed
such an option always exists.** It often does not — that is what makes a
tension productive — and the rule would then push the author to manufacture a
reason one of them is, which reads as reasoned and never gets re-examined. A
fallback ladder now says: cheaper to reverse, lower switching cost, already
built — and say that is why.
Also: `deciders` had no valid value while proposed; the body Status section
duplicated frontmatter with no precedence; the tension template silently dropped
the "address the strongest case against" requirement the plain format demands;
the preservation strategy — the actual technical content — got one angle bracket
while the easy parts got full templates; resolution triggers were singular for
tensions that routinely have several; and lineage/grill-me were listed as
cross-references at the bottom when they are pre-steps that change the content.
Closes#9
Bump-Type: minor
The GREEN run confirmed the gate works: given "builds are flaky again... what's
the fix?" with no run id and no log, it produced zero hypotheses and an ordered
list of artifacts, each justified by what it would discriminate. It also caught
that the retry already shipped in that pipeline is destroying the evidence
needed to diagnose it, which is a better finding than any hypothesis would have
been.
Then it found eight problems, and the first two are mine:
**The template contradicted the rule.** I banned high/medium/low labels in
Step 2 and left them in the Step 3 output template and all three worked-example
hypotheses. "Prose loses to a format block every time" — correct, and the
template is what gets imitated. Labels are gone from both; the slot is now WHY
FIRST, which asks for the evidence that sets the order rather than a restatement
of it.
**The description never mentioned the gate.** That is the text a harness shows
before an agent decides to load anything, and it read "Generate 3-5 ranked
hypotheses" — so an agent routing on the description alone does exactly the
thing this skill was rewritten to prevent. Both description and use_when now
lead with the refusal.
The rest:
- Intake vs the failed-fixes section pointed opposite ways for a report that
fires both, and nothing stated precedence. Intake wins, and says so: you
cannot aim hypotheses at a premise you have no evidence about either.
- "One run narrows the search to a single component" was overclaimed exactly
where it gets used — CI flakiness. One run *that reproduces* narrows it; a
passing run narrows nothing.
- session_log had no phase for a correct refusal, so an intake stop logged as a
failed read-failure. A metric that penalises the skill's best behaviour trains
the next model to guess. Added an `intake` phase.
- The Anti-Patterns table — the part people scan in a hurry — was missing the
failure this whole rewrite is about: answering "what's the fix?" from a report
with no artifact.
- brain_query told you to search on an error string you may have just refused to
proceed without. Now: query symptom + component, which may itself name the
artifact to ask for.
- condition-based-waiting was an unconditional load on any mention of a timeout,
including during an intake stop, which is the wrong side of the gate.
Closes#36
Bump-Type: minor
superpowers-systematic-debugging restated debug's core (hypothesis before fix)
across 296 lines, with a fix-implementation phase that belongs to tdd and a
rationalization table that mostly repeats debug's own Anti-Patterns. Two things
in it were not restatement, and both are now in debug: instrument every
component boundary before hypothesising when a bug spans components, and treat
three failed fixes as evidence the mechanism was never identified rather than
as a reason to try a fourth.
Not deleted with it, contrary to the issue: find-polluter.sh and the three
technique files (root-cause-tracing, defense-in-depth, condition-based-waiting)
are real assets, one of them an actual tool. They move to debug/references/ with
a stated load trigger each, because a reference nobody knows when to open is
dead weight. The pressure-test transcripts and CREATION-LOG from the upstream
fork go; they document obra's process, not ours.
Pressure-tested per #19, and the RED phase refuted the issue's premise. Two
subagents without the skill got the multi-component scenario and the four-failed-
fixes scenario; both already instrumented boundaries unprompted, and the second
refused to write a fifth fix on its own initiative. So these sections are not
correcting a demonstrated gap in this model — they are insurance for weaker
models and for prompts less well-posed than a test scenario. Recorded as such
rather than claimed as a fix.
The GREEN run applied both sections correctly and then found four defects in
them, all fixed here: the boundary rule read as suspending Iron Law 2's 3-5
hypotheses; the trigger said "reduced" when fixes that change nothing are the
stronger signal; "stop proposing a fourth" read as licence to return no
hypotheses at all; and the references had no load triggers. Its remaining
findings are pre-existing and filed as #36.
41 skills. debug 146 -> 188 lines.
Closes#14
Bump-Type: minor
Second half of #29. The index was hand-maintained and had already drifted
once: dream and experiment-spec shipped with no row, their rows lost to a
squash-merge after a directory reorg. bin/check-index caught that after the
fact; generating removes the class.
The curated summary and trigger move into each SKILL.md as `summary:` and
`use_when:`, carried over verbatim from the existing table rather than derived
from `description:` — description is a paragraph written for model selection,
and truncating it would have produced a worse table than the one it replaced.
Knowledge now lives once, next to the skill it describes, which is the argument
that made a hand-maintained index the wrong shape to begin with.
The table is written between markers, so the wiring docs, the relationships
tree and the trigger table below it are untouched — those are prose, not data.
Rows are alphabetical now; the conceptual grouping the old order carried lives
in the relationships tree, which is the better place for it. A fourth column
shows each skill's surfaces, which is what makes #29's field visible rather
than merely enforced.
bin/check-index and its test are deleted: a generated table cannot drift in
either direction, so `generate-index --check` subsumes both of its assertions.
Verified by mutation — deleting the tdd row turns `task check` red with
"SKILLS_INDEX.md is out of date".
Closes#29
Bump-Type: minor
~/.agents/skills was a single link straight at this checkout. That encoded an
assumption nobody had stated — that this checkout is the only source of skills
on the host. On flamingo it was not: Crush's directory held Anthropic's
official set, and the only way to install this library was to move that set
aside. A capability loss dressed up as a tidy-up.
The canonical location becomes a real directory of per-skill symlinks, fed by
the checkout plus anything in SKILLS_EXTRA_SOURCES. Harnesses keep their one
directory link, so the count is N + one per harness rather than N x harnesses,
which is what #23 was actually about.
The three requirements #27 named, each with a test:
- collisions are logged with both paths and the checkout wins, never resolved
in silence;
- removing a skill from a source prunes its link;
- anything in the managed directory that is not our symlink is reported and
left in place — the installer does not delete content it did not create.
doctor learns the same model: sources are recorded at ~/.agents/skills-sources,
a link into a configured source is healthy, a link into an unknown one is not,
and the old count check becomes a per-skill check because a per-skill layout
can lose one skill without changing any total. The pre-#27 wiring is named as
legacy rather than reported as damage. count_skills needed find -L; without it
symlinked skill directories count as zero.
Verified live on koala: migrated in place to 42 per-skill links, then a second
source added a 43rd alongside them, then a re-run without that source pruned it
back to 42. Only doctor finding throughout was the genuine stale plugin.
Closes#27
Bump-Type: minor
Verified duplicate rather than assumed one. Section for section it is the same
skill as `tdd` — Overview, When to Use, Iron Law, Red-Green-Refactor with the
same dot graph, Good Tests, Common Rationalizations, Red Flags, Verification
Checklist, When Stuck, Final Rule — with TypeScript examples and obra's "your
human partner" phrasing instead of ours. `tdd` carries all of it plus the
Go-specific material (table-driven tests, t.Run, testify, go test -race), the
brain MCP integration and the Mode 2 routing note.
Its one non-SKILL.md file, testing-anti-patterns.md, is byte-identical to
skills/tdd/references/testing-anti-patterns.md, which `tdd` already points at.
Nothing was salvageable because nothing was different.
No references anywhere outside its own directory except the index row, removed
here. `atdd` is untouched — acceptance-level is a genuinely different altitude
and it already cross-refs `tdd` correctly.
Incidentally the first live catch by bin/check-index (#15): deleting the
directory turned `task check` red with "SKILLS_INDEX.md lists
'superpowers-test-driven-development', which has no ...SKILL.md" before I got
to the row.
42 skills now. Closes#13
Bump-Type: patch
Missed in 83b069a. #15 asked for three things and the table row was only two
of them: experiment-spec also belongs in the Skill Relationships tree, parallel
to feature-spec and downstream of spec-driven-dev, since it is the research/ML
substitute for feature-spec rather than a separate lifecycle.
dream needs no edge, same as trainer and session-retrospective — the issue said
so and that part was right.
Refs #15
Bump-Type: patch
Both skills shipped without an index row. The rows existed — on the feature
branches deleted in #22 — and were dropped by the squash-merge that followed
a directory reorg: the SKILL.md landed under skills/, the row did not. Nothing
errored, the index just under-reported the library to every harness reading it.
Adding two rows by hand fixes today and not tomorrow, so the assertion goes in
`task check` via bin/check-index, following the same pattern as
bin/should-skip-release: a real script with a real test, not untested logic
buried in a Taskfile. It checks both directions — a skill with no row, and a
row naming a skill that no longer exists.
Verified by mutation: deleting the `dream` row turns `task check` red and the
report names it.
Closes#15
Bump-Type: patch
Wraps mathias/cad#14's `cad stuck` query surface: five-phase diagnostic
order (re-derive the worklist, read issue comments FIRST, then Actions job
logs, separate infrastructure fault from task outcome, decide-or-say
DECISION-NEEDED), read-only by Iron Law — no dispatch, no label writes, no
issue close. Every diagnosis cites a locator; every operator-only call
surfaces as a structured DECISION NEEDED block instead of being decided for
them.
Built after cad#14 passed its live-estate acceptance test (7 real findings,
locators verified) — the skill is the ritual around a query already proven
to produce actionable rows, not a checklist with no input.
Bump-Type: minor
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
CI now writes the computed semver into .claude-plugin/plugin.json before
tagging, committed with [skip-release] so it does not re-trigger the tagger.
Claude Code gates plugin updates on that field: without the bump, installed
hosts never see a new tag no matter how many releases go out. `task check`
enforces manifest/tag equality so the two cannot silently diverge.
Docs rewritten around the two delivery paths, and the checkout location is now
stated as load-bearing rather than incidental: SKILLS_CHECKOUT_DIR defaults to
~/.local/share/skills because that is host-local and outside any synced
directory. The previous docs told you to clone into ~/dev, which on this fleet
is an iCloud folder shared by two Macs spanning two path roots — a git working
tree with concurrent writers, and absolute links that are broken on one side by
construction. That advice is what #23 is about; it is now inverted with the
reason attached.
Antigravity and Vibe removed from the docs along with their targets.
Bump-Type: patch
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
Was a loose secret-hygiene.md at the root of ~/.claude/skills — not
dir/SKILL.md, so no harness ever loaded it. Promoted to a real skill so
it installs to Claude Code, Crush, Antigravity and Vibe alike.
Frontmatter description carries load-before triggers (kubectl exec/env,
whole-file SOPS decrypt, token rotation) so it fires ahead of the command
that would leak, not after.
Bump-Type: minor
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
Verified this session: `task install` (and its sub-targets) wipe/skip the
per-skill symlinks (0/40 across all harnesses), while install.sh wires 40/40
reliably. Point the wiring docs at install.sh until the Taskfile bug is fixed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The index still described local-dev's old wire-skills.sh / ~/dev/.skills
mechanism. This repo is now the canonical home; wiring is `task install`
(claude global+repo, crush, antigravity, vibe) or the curl|bash install.sh.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Consolidating the divergence between this repo and local-dev's embedded
~/dev/.skills/ (the two had drifted; the 19 overlapping skills were byte-identical).
- Import the 17 skills that existed only in local-dev: discovery-framing,
stage-gate-review, web-shot, and the 14 superpowers-* skills. This repo is now
the superset / single source of truth.
- SKILLS_INDEX.md: add rows for the 17.
- install.sh + Taskfile.yml: git.d-ma.be host (was stale gitea.d-ma.be, which
broke the one-line curl|bash installer post-rename).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Phase 1 of mathias/skills extraction (infra#62 Track D — homelab
next-step plan addendum). Imports ~/dev/.skills/ verbatim (19 skill
dirs + SKILLS_INDEX.md) and adds the installation surface:
- Taskfile.yml — install / update / list / release / check targets
- install.sh — bootstrap installer for hosts without Task. Idempotent
symlink wirer; default checkout at ~/.local/share/skills/ on every
host; SKILLS_REF env var pins a tag (default: main).
- .gitea/workflows/release.yml — auto-tag every push to main by
Bump-Type footer (major/minor/patch, default patch). Skipped when
commit contains [skip-release].
- README — usage, versioning, contribution flow, secret-hygiene rule.
Phase 1 wires Claude Code only (~/.claude/skills/<name> global +
<repo>/.claude/skills/<name> per-repo). Phase 2 adds Crush, opencode,
antigravity, and gitea-resident agents (cobalt-dingo, agentsquad)
once their skill conventions are researched.
Public repo, markdown-only — no secrets, no client names. Verified
via pre-push grep before initial push.
[skip-release]
mathias
