Skill Audit

Score a skill's structure and design. Not its output quality (that's skill-improver) and not building one (that's skill-creator).

Read references/checklist.md first. It defines every item and which ones apply. Then read the Traps section below before flagging any M1, C4, DP1, or broken-link finding. Those calls look obvious in a grep and are backwards in practice.

Process

1. Read the whole skill directory, every file.
2. Score the checklist: S1-S4, C1-C6, D1-D2, B1-B2, E1, P1-P3, DP1-DP5, M1-M4. One point each, as a fraction of the items that apply.
3. Write the scorecard. Rank fixes by impact.
4. Ask before changing anything.

Three items need a command, not a read:

• E1: dry-run the entrypoint (python -m scripts.<x> --help) before scoring it.
• C5: grep -nE "NEVER|DO NOT|don't" SKILL.md references/*.md for bans with no reason.
• DP1-DP5: run these over the body, then read every hit in context. grep -nE "CRITICAL|IMPORTANT|MUST|ALWAYS|NEVER" SKILL.md (density, not instances), grep -niE "step by step|<scratchpad>|<thinking>|plan before acting" SKILL.md, grep -niE "hold (all )?(findings|results)|don't narrate|no interim|never use (bullets|headers|bold)" SKILL.md, grep -nE "at most [0-9]+|under [0-9]+ words|every [0-9]+ (tool calls|messages)|STEP [0-9]" SKILL.md, grep -niE "claude-2|claude-3|claude-instant|3\\.5|3\\.7|gpt-4" SKILL.md. For DP5, git log -p --follow SKILL.md | grep -c '^+.*description:' shows a description that only ever grows, and git blame dates any rule you cannot otherwise justify.
• Reference health: python3 ~/.hermes/skills/skills-meta/skill-audit/scripts/check_reference_health.py <skill-dir>. Add --orphans for the whole tree. Exits 1 on a dangling pointer, so it can gate a commit.

For codebase drift, prompt-budget weight, usage, upstream forks, and gap audits, see references/drift-and-budget.md.

Traps

Six judgment calls that come from audits that got them wrong.

Never trim a description under DP1. DP1 fails ambient emphasis, and a description full of trigger phrases and urgency looks exactly like the thing it fails. It is the opposite: routing text may carry calibrated urgency, because skills currently under-trigger, and the description is the one line that decides whether the skill loads at all. Behavioral text explains, trigger text may push. The same protection covers a "Use when:" block or a trigger list. Classify by function before flagging, because these are identical to a grep.

Never strip a reality check while hunting M1. This is the most damaging mistake here. "Re-read your own answer" and "run the app and watch it work" look alike in a grep and are opposites in effect. The first is a redundant self-check on a model that already self-verifies. The second is the evidence-gathering that stops an agent claiming success it never observed, and it is the house rule in SOUL.md. Read every M1 hit in context. If the instruction points at the real system (run it, hit the endpoint, gh pr checks, read the row back, screenshot it, git fetch then read origin), it passes. Only self-directed re-reading fails. Getting this backwards makes a skill worse while the scorecard says it improved.

A terminal constraint checklist is not C4 duplication. A skill that states a rule in its body and restates it as a one-liner in a closing "Rules" or "Anti-Patterns" list is doing the right thing, co-locating the ban where the model acts. C4 targets the same explanation twice as full prose, like a walkthrough orphaned mid-skill and repeated in its own section. Ask which one you're looking at before flagging.

A stated rule can still be unreachable. A skill can ban something in a mid-file Anti-Patterns list and still violate it, because the model generates from the ## Output Format block and never re-consults distant rules. When a skill has an output template, check its hard constraints sit with the template. A sample output that breaks a stated rule proves the constraint is misplaced. Confirmed: a research lens banning verdicts, severity, and pre-mortems emitted all three until the bans moved into the Output Format block, fixing 4 of 6 evals.

Cross-skill pointers are legitimate, not broken links. A SKILL.md routinely points at a reference owned by a sibling (cpe-research to render-cli's build-failure-diagnostics.md). A naive "does this exist in my own references/?" check calls these broken. In one audit 184 of 218 resolved to a sibling, only 34 were dangling. The script above already resolves against the whole tree.

Repointing a dead link: match content, not filename. Don't substitute the nearest-named or nearest-dated sibling. Grep the surviving references for the topic the pointer promised (grep -l '10b5-1' references/*.md) and point at the file that has it. A proximity guess sends the agent to unrelated content, which is worse than a dead link because it looks like it worked.

Scorecard

# Skill Audit: [skill-name]
## Type: [Library & API Reference | Product Verification | Data Fetching & Analysis |
##        Business Process & Team Automation | Code Scaffolding & Templates]
## Score: [X]/[applicable]

### Passing
- [item]: [what's good]

### Warnings
- [item]: [what's borderline and why]
- [unscored model-fit shapes: missing scope ceiling, stale capability workaround]

### Failing
- [item]: [what's wrong + the specific fix]

### Recommended Actions
1. [highest impact first]

Quote the offending line for every failing item. A finding without a line is not actionable.

One line per item. No preamble, no summary paragraph. Skip any section with nothing in it rather than writing "none." A clean skill's scorecard is three lines, and that's the right length.

Scoring

• Be honest. A typical first draft scores 4-6/10.
• Report every issue, then rank. Don't filter while reading, don't cap the count.
• When in doubt, fail. A false flag costs less than a missed defect.
• D2 passes if the skill doesn't need those patterns. Fail only if it needs them and skips them.
• Don't penalize a small skill for being short. A 20-line SKILL.md for a small job is correct.
• The description is what people get wrong most. It's a routing instruction, not a summary.

Fixing what you find

When two skills overlap, fold the smaller into the larger as a section, then delete it and confirm the survivor's description covers both trigger sets.

When one skill has grown past 500 lines or 20KB with duplicate-topic references, that's accretion. Score it as one root cause, not as separate S2, B2, and C4 failures. Symptom checks and the split procedure are in references/mega-file-split.md.