agentic-praxis-grimoire

APG11 Skill Authoring, Maintenance, and Roadmap Closure Evaluation

Objective

APG11 formalizes repeated skill-authoring and maintenance practice without creating another skill, adds one dependency-free read-only checker for stable mechanical skill-library invariants, and closes every former unnumbered candidate or explicitly deferred roadmap theme. It does not change a current skill, maturity, dependency, release, public checkout, global integration, RepoMap repository, or Superpowers retirement state.

Repeated-practice basis

APG4 established six canonical leaves, frontmatter, structural owners, scenario evidence, provenance, review, and rollback. APG6 corrected one frontmatter discovery boundary. APG7 and APG7A added failing-first executable evidence, deterministic helpers, bounded correction, recovery, and independent review. APG9 reconciled release and transition facts. APG10 froze scenarios, established current behavior, made one behavior-bearing correction, reran the same cases, preserved provenance, and retained rollback and maturity boundaries.

Four independent APG11 analyses separately reviewed the lifecycle, mechanical invariants, legacy ledger, and proposed design. The design review required corrections for Python bytecode writes, justified agents/ metadata, frontmatter/Markdown/catalog lexical boundaries, duplicate maintenance ownership, stable ledger identities, and APG11’s own rollback. ADR 0008 and the implementation incorporate those corrections.

The pinned specification is documentation under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; repository code is separately Apache-2.0. APG11 copies or adapts neither specification expression nor upstream code. It independently implements compatible format facts and project-authored constraints, and the immutable specification and license links provide attribution. No bundled third-party license or notice text is required for that synthesized use.

Accepted decision and owner

ADR 0008 accepts the skill authoring and maintenance guide as the normative skill-specific lifecycle owner. The project model remains the general artifact-destination and practice-lifecycle owner; the skill catalog owns current leaves and maturity; provenance owns source and rights facts; evaluations and exits own bounded evidence; and the checker owns only adopted mechanical invariants.

APG adds no skill-authoring leaf. The work is maintainer governance with authority, evidence, and repository-policy inputs rather than a generally triggerable execution procedure.

Lifecycle and change classes

The guide uses ten steps: authorize the problem, inspect existing owners, inventory sources and rights, classify the change, freeze proportional acceptance/non-trigger/edge/stop/rollback evidence, establish baseline behavior when behavior changes, author the smallest APG-native artifact, run scenarios and mechanical checks, obtain independent review, and record provenance, maturity, maintenance, disposition, and rollback.

Its change-class matrix distinguishes new skills, frontmatter-only discovery corrections, behavior-bearing procedure corrections, support/helper additions, maturity-only dispositions, and deprecation/removal. Evidence, correction bounds, mechanical gates, records, review, rollback, and maturity effect scale with the class rather than using one universal ceremony.

Semantic and mechanical boundary

bin/apg-check-skill-library is a thin Python wrapper over one Python 3.10+ standard-library helper. The wrapper disables bytecode writes before loading the helper. The command surface is:

apg-check-skill-library [--root <path>] [--format text|json]
apg-check-skill-library --help

The default root is the repository containing the command. Success returns 0, library noncompliance returns 1, and usage failure returns 2. Text and schema-versioned JSON output are deterministic, repository-relative, and read-only.

The checker validates the canonical tree and regular leaves, APG’s required plain-scalar metadata subset, name grammar and directory agreement, trigger- oriented descriptions, one H1 and the seven adopted H2 owners, accepted nonempty support shape, contained support symlinks, accepted literal local links outside fenced code, the exact catalog table and maturity vocabulary, and checked-in Codex projection set/type/raw-target/resolved identity.

It does not implement general YAML or Markdown and does not prove semantic trigger quality, usefulness, authority, privacy, source rights, provenance truth, scenario quality, client discovery or invocation, over-triggering, maturity fitness, public-release completeness, production readiness, or stable behavior.

Tests and dogfood

The principal unit and integration surfaces were written before production. The unit suite initially failed because the helper did not exist. The integration suite produced 45 expected executable-not-found errors and one environment-gated public-check skip because the command did not exist.

After implementation:

The public v0.1.0 pass concerns only the skill-library structure. It does not hide or correct the known omitted bin/apg-project-skills wrapper; APG12 still owns that publication defect.

Retrospective APG10 dogfood

APG10 satisfies the semantic and predecessor-gate portions of the new behavior- bearing correction contract without rewriting its history. It identified implementing-with-test-discipline as the owner, bounded source rights and derivation, froze twelve scenarios, established current behavior, made one correction, reran affected positive/non-trigger/edge cases, obtained fresh non-author leaf review, passed regression gates, updated provenance, recorded rollback, and left maturity unchanged. APG11’s current checker pass supplies the newly adopted mechanical gate that could not have run during APG10.

Subsequent correction: APG11A

APG11A preserves the accepted lifecycle, checker purpose, parser architecture, and legacy-roadmap closure while correcting two independently reproduced lexical false negatives in the original helper. A quoted or whitespace-before- colon top-level name or description key could shadow the accepted required entry because APG11 scanned only exact required-key prefixes. A same-marker fence line with trailing language text could close an open fence because the opening-prefix recognizer also served as the closing test.

APG11A first added focused behavioral evidence. Against the unchanged APG11 helper, the 15-test unit surface failed 12 required-key and fence subcases, and the 58-test integration surface failed exactly the two new command cases by returning exit 0. The correction adds one narrow top-level key recognizer, diagnostic APG035 for unsupported column-zero key syntax, and a closing-fence contract requiring the same marker, sufficient length, and no trailing content other than spaces or tabs.

After correction, 15 unit tests, 58 checker integration tests, 22 report-tool Bats families, and 28 project-skill integration families pass. Generated cases reject quoted, whitespace-before-colon, tabbed, and explicit mapping-key forms for both required keys; nested optional metadata remains supported; and the reproduced hidden ## Procedure fails with APG016. Development and fresh public v0.1.0 libraries pass in deterministic text and JSON modes without mutation. A fresh checker reviewer accepted the correction with no finding.

This is subsequent correction evidence. It does not claim that the APG11 commit already contained the fix, change any skill or maturity state, conceal the public v0.1.0 wrapper omission, or start APG12.

New-skill rejection dogfood

A generic Karpathy Guidelines skill remains unjustified because APG10 found the useful themes already owned, project-owned, rejected, or addressable by one existing procedure correction. A skill-authoring skill is also unjustified: the project model, provenance policy, maintainer guide, checker, and review procedure already own its separable concerns. Neither proposal demonstrates an independently triggerable ownership gap, and both would duplicate existing authority and procedure.

Legacy roadmap closure

The legacy roadmap ledger assigns 24 stable identities and terminal dispositions: nine implemented, one implemented by APG11, five future-active, six conditional, and three rejected or project- owned. Composite implementation/test and review/delivery themes retain explicit sub-dispositions. The two APG13 questions remain distinct: broader evidence and maturity disposition versus explicit post-Superpowers suitability.

Future-active ownership closes a legacy question but does not claim implementation. APG12 owns two distribution questions, APG13 owns two skill- review questions, and APG14 owns public v0.2 publication.

APG skill use and non-triggers

designing-significant-changes resolved the owner, parser, safety, and rollback decisions. planning-repository-work organized the dependent implementation and documentation sequence. implementing-with-test-discipline governed failing- first checker work. composing-bounded-worker-assignments bounded the four authorized independent analyses. reviewing-and-verifying-repository-work governs artifact acceptance and completion evidence.

debugging-systematically remained a non-trigger for the expected missing- implementation failures. It triggered later when one pre-existing Bats concurrency case failed during a parallel multi-suite run after passing at baseline. The case and then the complete 22-test suite passed serially; no APG11 production path participated, so the evidence supported no code correction and the final gate remained serial.

Independent review

The pre-implementation design critic returned correction-required; all six material corrections were incorporated before production implementation. The fresh checker/safety review and process/roadmap review also returned correction-required. Their frontmatter/body isolation, contained Markdown symlink, catalog-column, diagnostic escaping, installation exit, source-rights, completion-timing, APG10 timing, and ledger-wording findings have been corrected. Narrow confirmation accepted both focused review correction sets. A fresh complete-diff reviewer then returned correction-required for two residuals; the candidate-summary and missing-helper corrections passed narrow confirmation at staged-patch SHA-256 bda2ec785470a817beca0408e3f0e152f000d2911e513b50cbdd398626937288 with no residual finding.

Limitations

Disposition and next boundary

APG11 is accepted as one maintainer procedure, one narrow mechanical checker, and one closed legacy ledger. All six skill leaves remain byte-identical to the APG10 baseline and remain provisional.

APG12 is the next separately authorized phase. It owns public-sourced global integration and validated public projection/release mechanics. APG11 does not begin APG12, APG13, APG14, public mutation, global integration change, RepoMap mutation, Superpowers restoration, maturity promotion, or v0.2 publication.