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Bo 10f0277bdb Legible membrane, Train 2: what a stranger meets (#1100)
## Legible membrane, Train 2: what a stranger meets

Provenance: the 2026-09-02 field audit of this repo against
mattpocock/skills, compound-engineering, and the jsm corpus, findings F5
through F9. This train is sized by a consumer inventory built with `rg`
on the tip before any lane was written; the promoted-set directory move
the audit proposed is deferred because that inventory shows
skill-builder backing two blocking gates, swarm pinned by the cathedral
gate and a routing golden, using-gc required by Go code, and `ao skills
link` unable to install a second root. That inventory is the plan for a
later train.

**What changes.**
- **Archival sweep by consumer disposition.** 172 audit snapshots, 29
pawl receipts, the `evals/workbench` and `evals/membrane` trees with
their two bats consumers, four stray scratch docs, four retired eval
contracts, and nine caller-less `scripts/check-*.sh` are deleted; git
history is the archive. Every machine list that referenced them is
pruned (evidence-grounding baseline, preamble grandfather, broken-links
allowlist, `.gitattributes`, `.gitignore`, two eval fixtures, the
workflow-coverage deferred list). `docs/audits/manifests/` and
`.agents/ao/config.yaml` survive because they have live readers. About
48,000 lines.
- **Three skills retired.** `goals` (alias of fitness), `shared`
(tombstone), and `scope` (folded into plan step 3 as five write-scope
checks). Consumers edited; the probe denominator exclusion for goals
pruned; Codex package and golden count pins updated.
- **Negative routing** on research, codebase-recon, reverse-engineer,
premortem, one-way-door, and council, all within the 180-char budget,
with a teardown golden (`rq-08`). One wording was changed after the
router's prefix stemming showed "repository teardown" leaking into the
wrong skill.
- **Every promoted skill answers "It's working if"** with observable
tells in backticks, and carries a paste-ready `## Prompt` with a
concrete subject. Two fictional `ao` subcommands a draft prompt named
were caught by the body-ref validator and replaced with real commands.
- **Doctrine diet on the core five.** rpi, plan, implement, validate,
and anti-ceremony drop from about 5,100 words to 3,600 (bodies from
4,700 to 3,150) by moving the shared ownership boundary, dated
incidents, and mechanics tables into step-loaded references
(`skills/rpi/references/boundaries.md`,
`skills/validate/references/mechanics.md`,
`skills/plan/references/ground-truth-routing.md`). Every cathedral
canary and every skill validator grep survives unchanged.

- **ADR-0018** records the goals, shared, and scope retirement; the
cathedral gate tombstone and the routing goldens cite it instead of
ADR-0017.
- **Router and twins.** `ao skills find` holds a description's "Not for
X; that is <sibling>." sentence out of its haystack, so premortem no
longer ranks first for "is this live decision reversible" (golden
`rq-10` pins the reciprocal of `rq-02`); a penalty variant was tried and
reverted because it suppressed skills the caller named outright. A
declared trigger phrase of two or more words quoted whole in the query
now earns the name weight once, so "check this change" lands on validate
rather than on reality-check's name token; a live-catalog test pins
seven such queries. Single-quoted YAML descriptions unescape `''`. The
Codex catalog keeps the exclusion sentence, and a closing `>` no longer
turns `<run-id>/codebase-recon.json` into an invocation.
- **Residue the judges found.** handoff, learn, and status open a `##
Contract` heading after their tells; validate's prompt names its helper
at `skills/validate/scripts/validate.py`; the explicit-skill prompt
catalog names only live skills (five stale prompts replaced by nine,
floor 20 restored, TESTING.md names the suite); the corpus-delta receipt
binds the runner's path and SHA-256 and labels a `live_agent` claim as
an unverified caller declaration; the probe README and ledger describe
the 12-skill denominator; SKILL-API counts 30 of 54.

**Evidence on the tip.** Regen check clean; full gate green with a
HEAD-built binary; CI's bats command green; Go build/vet/test green;
lint clean; security gate quick PASS; docs-build warnings did not rise.
Fresh validation by Fable 5.1 (caller-elected) and a cross-family read
by Codex, both recorded in the PR thread.

---------

Co-authored-by: Bo <bofuller55@gmail.com>
2026-09-03 19:52:55 +00:00

1.2 KiB

Testing

Use the narrowest deterministic check that proves the changed behavior during an experiment. Run the repository's ordinary full deterministic suite once on the complete candidate.

Core contract checks

python3 -m unittest discover -s skills/validate/tests
./scripts/check-cathedral-cut-conformance.py
python3 scripts/generate-skill-mesh.py --check
cd cli && go test ./...

The Validate helper is also probed in a temporary non-Git directory with no ao on PATH. Fake git, ao, tracker, push, and delivery executables ensure identity and verdict helpers do not acquire hidden substrate dependencies.

ao gate check is an ordinary test runner. Its exit status is not a semantic verdict and does not authorize delivery.

Explicit skill requests

tests/explicit-skill-requests/ holds one prompt per shipped skill that a caller invokes by name (prompts/<skill>.txt). run-all.sh feeds each prompt to a fresh session and asserts the named skill is what fires, before any tool call. The static half runs without a model: evals/agentops-core/fixtures/explicit-skill-prompts-smoke.sh proves every prompt names a skill that exists in both skills/ and skills-codex/, so a retired skill cannot linger as a live prompt.