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.
Teknium
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