The bundled docx, xlsx, powerpoint, and pdf skills were adapted from
Anthropic's document skills and carried their proprietary LICENSE.txt
(no derivatives, no redistribution). Flagged as critical license
findings by the SkillEvaluator Tier 1 scan of our skill tree.
This replaces all four with clean-room rewrites:
- Authored from scratch against library knowledge only (python-docx,
openpyxl, python-pptx, pypdf/reportlab/pdfplumber — all MIT/BSD) by
isolated subagents given functional specs, with an explicit
prohibition on reading the prior skill content or anthropics/skills;
session transcripts retained as provenance evidence.
- MIT licensed (LICENSE file per skill), author: Nous Research.
- Each skill: SKILL.md to house standards + argparse helper scripts
with UTF-8-explicit I/O + its own e2e pytest suite (fixtures built
on the fly, non-ASCII round-trips run under LC_ALL=C).
- All four pass SkillEvaluator Tier 1 pii+unicode+lint 3/3.
tests/skills/test_office_document_skills.py rewritten against the new
contracts: MIT/no-Anthropic-text invariants, scripts documented in
SKILL.md, argparse CLI shape, and a no-locale-default-open() check
(which caught and fixed a real gap: pdfplumber text reads are fine,
but the invariant scan now guards every future script).
Docs pages regenerated for the four skills (scoped; unrelated
generator drift excluded).
Honest capability deltas vs the old versions are documented per
SKILL.md (e.g. tracked-changes accept/reject and OOXML XSD validation
are not reimplemented; form flattening limits stated).
AST-driven pass over every Path.read_text()/write_text() without an
explicit encoding= across non-test code: 71 sites in 34 files
(skills_hub, hermes_cli/main+profiles+service_manager+container_boot,
mem0/hindsight/honcho plugins, achievements dashboard, release/CI
scripts, productivity+comfyui skill helpers, agent/*). Verified zero
positional-encoding collisions before insertion; per-file compile()
check after.
Adds a check-windows-footguns rule flagging bare single-line
read_text/write_text (multi-line forms stay covered by the AST guard
test from #38985). Together with the salvaged contributor commits this
retires the ~169-site bare file-I/O class (#37423's long tail).
The bundled office skills (#68595) read user documents and agent-authored
payloads with the locale-default codec:
- docx/powerpoint validators/base.py opened OOXML part XML in text mode
before handing it to lxml. On Windows (cp1251/GBK) the bytes decode to
mojibake that lxml then parses, so validation runs against silently
corrupted document text; on locales where the UTF-8 bytes don't decode
the validator crashes with UnicodeDecodeError instead of validating.
Opening as bytes lets lxml honor the encoding declared in the XML prolog.
- The pdf form scripts (fill_fillable_fields, fill_pdf_form_with_annotations,
create_validation_image, check_bounding_boxes) read the fields JSON the
agent authors — UTF-8 by construction — with the locale codec, so
non-ASCII form values (any Cyrillic/CJK/accented input) either crash or
get written into the user's PDF as mojibake. The json.dump writers use
ensure_ascii=True and were already safe; only the readers needed pinning.
Adds a contract test asserting every document/payload reader is
locale-independent, plus a live regression test that runs
check_bounding_boxes.py on a non-ASCII fields.json under a forced
non-UTF-8 locale — it fails without the fix on both POSIX (C locale)
and Windows (cp1251 chokes on the 0x98 byte of U+2018).
AST-driven pass over every subprocess.run/Popen/check_output/check_call/call
with text=True (or universal_newlines=True) and no explicit encoding=:
append encoding='utf-8', errors='replace' at the kwarg site. 136 call
sites across 28 files (cli.py, hermes_cli/main.py, tools_config.py,
environments, computer_use, gateway, scripts, skills helpers, agent/*).
Together with the salvaged #55339/#60741 commits this closes out issue
#53428's bug class; the salvaged #60751 linter rule in
check-windows-footguns.py now enforces it repo-wide (verified: 807 files
scanned, zero findings).
Teknium