The skill review fork, the combined memory+skill review, and the curator's
consolidation pass all described references/ as the place for
"session-specific detail", and the curator's demote step said to move a
sibling's file under the umbrella. Followed literally over months that
produced one dev skill with a 100k SKILL.md dense in PR numbers and 443
one-per-session reference files, plus five sibling skills restating the
same rules and the repo's AGENTS.md.
The three prompts now share one shape contract: an entry is an imperative
rule plus one clause of why, stated once; no PR/issue numbers, dates, or
quoted chat as content; references/ is a small topical set extended in
place, never a per-session file; skills do not restate always-loaded
context. Consolidation is defined as distilling, and copying a sibling
verbatim under references/ is named as the failure. skill_manage's schema
carries the one-sentence version.
Two advisory linter rules make the shape visible in the tool result the
moment it starts to drift: incident-log-shape (PR/issue-number density in
prose) and references-sprawl (>60 reference files), the latter also run
on references/ writes. On the real before/after: the old skill trips both,
the consolidated one trips neither.
The Sep 2026 decomposition (PR #102117) makes internal import paths a non-API: names now live in
the focused modules that define them. This commit is the ONLY thing keeping the old paths alive,
so external plugins have time to update. It is deliberately a single, unsquashed commit:
git revert <this sha>
removes every shim, stub and manifest at once on the announced date. Nothing in-tree may depend on
these pointers: scripts/check_compat_pointers.py (wired into lint.yml) fails CI if it does.
What it adds (see COMPAT_MANIFEST.md, compat_manifest.json):
- 332 facade modules get one delimited `PLUGIN-COMPAT` block appended at the end of the file
- 1,172 moved names resolved lazily via a module `__getattr__` (PEP 562) — never a top-level import,
so no import cycles; facades that already had `__getattr__` get a chained one
- 592 third-party/stdlib names the old modules used to expose, with their original import statements
- 266 public definitions that had been deleted as unused, restored byte-for-byte from the pre-decomposition
tree (+40 private helpers and 16 imports pulled in only because a restored definition needs them)
- 3 deleted modules recreated as re-export stubs (gateway/startup_watchdog, hermes_cli/observability/
relay_runtime, tools/environments/modal_utils)
- private names (`_x`) get no pointer: they were never API (3,792 skipped)
Verified: all 335 touched modules import under a fresh HERMES_HOME and every manifest name resolves;
the lint reports zero in-tree uses; ruff clean; targeted suites unchanged.
The _POSIX_PRIMITIVES tuple holds search-pattern STRINGS the linter
greps for in skill scripts — 'os.setsid' / 'signal.SIGKILL' are data,
not calls. Add inline # windows-footgun: ok suppressions.
Adds tools/skill_linter.py — a soft companion to the hard frontmatter
validator. It encodes the CONTRIBUTING 'Skill authoring standards
(HARDLINE)' conventions that today only a human reviewer catches:
- shell-utility references in prose (`grep`/`sed`/`cat`...) that should
name the native tool (search_files/patch/read_file)
- missing version/author/license/metadata.hermes block
- name != directory, invalid name format
- description over the 60-char prompt budget, marketing words
- dangling references/ links, forbidden scaffolding files
- POSIX-only script primitives without a platforms: gate
Findings are ADVISORY. skill_manage(create) attaches them as
lint_warnings + lint_hint in the success result; nothing is blocked
(the hard rejects already run in _validate_frontmatter). A CLI
(python -m tools.skill_linter <dir>) exits 1 only on ERROR-severity
findings so CI can gate on structural breakage without failing on nits.
Calibrated against the bundled skills/ tree: 76 advisory findings, exit 0,
no false positives after excluding repo-root scripts/ refs.
Inspired by MiniMax Code's skill-creator lint step; adapted to our
existing validator + skill_utils rather than a parallel system.
Teknium