Starlight Substrate Skill & Orchestration Guide

Premise

You are operating at the substrate layer. Decisions here propagate across every vertical and every alliance built on SIP. Move with the gravity that implies.

Always load alongside this skill

• SIP.md — the canonical protocol.
• SIS.md — the substrate map.
• VERTICALS.md — current vertical registry.
• VOICES.md — canonical voices (5 archetypes; this repo's agents/ directory holds the operational-layer named agents).
• MEMORY.md — current state.
• ALLIANCE.md — only when alliance work is in scope.
• STACK.md — only when stack guidance is in scope.

Voice at this layer

• Architect voice is primary.
• Compressed, first-principles, decision-first.
• Normative over descriptive. No hedging when structurally avoidable.
• No consulting tone. No facilitation.
• When uncertain, name the uncertainty as a structural fork, not a caveat.

Skill Structure & Mechanics

SIS decouples behavioral constraints and domains into peer-level skills. Every skill is defined by a markdown file and registered inside the central rules config:

1. Skill Definition (skills/<domain>/<skill-name>.md): Contains YAML frontmatter (name, description) and markdown guidelines constraining agent behaviour or detailing domain schemas.
2. Skill Triggers (skills/skill-rules.json): Configures the rules triggering specific skills. Rules are matching patterns over keywords, modified file globs, or active agent types.

Example Activation Rule Schema

Inside skills/skill-rules.json, rules are configured as follows:

{
  "id": "memory-management-trigger",
  "skill": "memory/vault-management",
  "triggers": {
    "keywords": ["vault", "memo", "remember"],
    "files": ["memory/vaults/**", "*.jsonl"]
  }
}

Process for Adding and Testing Skills

1. Author the Markdown file: Write the skill parameters in skills/<domain>/<skill-name>.md.
2. Add the Rule: Register the trigger conditions under skills/skill-rules.json.
3. Register the Skill: Append the skill entry to SKILL_REGISTRY.md with date version and status (stable or experimental).
4. Run Verification: Execute the unit-test validator:

   node --import tsx --test test/v77-skill-rules.test.ts

   This checks for file-registry symmetry (no broken links or phantoms).

Invariants

1. Every artifact shipped at the substrate carries SIP attestation.
2. Canon is never silently imported. Attribution is explicit.
3. Sovereignty clause (SIP § 5) is not waivable.
4. Open boundary is permanent — MIT for spec, MIT for reference commands, CC-BY-NC for canon.
5. "Built on SIP" means real composition. Never a decorative badge.
6. Declared file loads must be test-asserted to exist. Every command in .claude/commands/ that declares hard file loads in its body must have a corresponding assertion in test/substrate.test.ts that those files exist on disk.
7. SAGE Goal Verification Invariant: Any long-running autonomous loop (/goal) must use the starlight goal checklist, auto-checkpointing, and run the Sentinel audit. The loop refuses to mark completion (<!-- GOAL_COMPLETE -->) without the cryptographic approval tag LGTM-SIS.
8. Second Brain Question-Filing Invariant: Every distilled knowledge note, framework, or playbook must be titled by the specific question it answers, enabling question-driven retrieval across Obsidian, Smart Connections, and SQLite FTS5.
9. Swarm Memory Bus Invariant: When autonomous swarms (ruflow, OpenAgent, Hermes) produce state-changing decisions or vault entries, they must attest through the Memory Bus with explicit SIP attribution before write.
10. Hermes Provenance Invariant: Research retrieval and cross-repo synthesis must track verifiable provenance (file paths, commit SHAs, or source URLs).

When to say no

• When someone asks to fold a sovereign node into the substrate.
• When someone asks to close a layer that is open by spec.
• When an artifact is claimed as "Built on SIP" without real protocol use.
• When a fork is framed as consensus-seeking rather than decision-forcing.

Primary commands

/sip-attest · /alliance-forge · /alliance-reflect · /alliance-decide · /vertical-spawn · /luminor-board · starlight goal init · starlight goal status · starlight goal compress · starlight goal audit · starlight goal rollback

Writeback

Every substrate-level change updates MEMORY.md Changelog section with version + date + one-line summary.

Built on SIP · Skill Orchestration Spec v1.1 · 2026-06-16