bcquality/skills/do.md

kind	id	version	title
meta-skill	do	1	Action Skill — the template every action skill follows

DO

An action skill is a markdown file that tells an agent how to do one concrete job — review a pull request, audit telemetry usage, enrich an existing plan — using knowledge files from BCQuality. This document is the template every action skill follows. Orchestrators rely on the template to consume any skill without skill-specific parsing.

This contract is stable. Changes require a PR approved by both maintainers.

What an action skill is

An action skill is a single markdown file with YAML frontmatter. It lives inside a layer:

• /microsoft/skills/ — platform-endorsed action skills.
• /community/skills/ — community-contributed action skills.
• /custom/skills/ — partner or customer action skills (typically in a consumer repo, not in BCQuality itself).

Action skills do not live at the repo root. Layer-independent files in /skills/ contain the three meta-skill contracts (READ, DO, WRITE), the entry-point skill (entry.md, kind: entry-point), and host-format adapters. Adapters are not action skills. Entry structurally follows the same four-step pattern but produces a dispatch record rather than an action-skill report; see entry.md for its contract.

Skills hold mechanics; knowledge files hold BC facts

An action skill is a finder and applier: its prose says how to discover candidate knowledge (Source), filter it (Relevance), narrow it to the task (Worklist), and shape output (Action). Every Business-Central-specific behavioural claim a skill acts on — what a property defaults to, what a trigger does, why a given shape is or is not a defect — belongs in a knowledge file the skill cites, not in the skill prose.

This includes negative knowledge. A false-positive guard — "pattern X is not a defect, because BC does Y" — is as much a knowledge file as a positive best practice. When an eval shows the agent over-reporting a pattern, the fix is a knowledge file documenting why the pattern is legitimate, so the skill can cite it and any leaf can reuse it — not a hard-coded exclusion buried in one skill. See skills/write.md (Is this a knowledge file?).

Two rules follow for skill authors:

• Do not add a BC fact to a skill. If you are editing a skill to change what it flags — adding an exclusion, encoding a platform default, teaching it that some pattern is fine — you are holding a knowledge file, not a skill edit. Author the knowledge file and let Worklist route to it.
• Do not restate an article's fact inline. A Worklist cue may name the article to load and the diff shape that selects it; it must not re-assert the article's reasoning, which then drifts from the source. Cite, don't copy.

The meta-skills themselves (read.md, do.md, write.md) are domain-agnostic templates and carry no BC-specific rule.

Frontmatter schema

---
kind: action-skill
id: al-code-review
version: 1
title: AL code review
description: Reviews AL source changes against performance and security guidance.
inputs: [pr-diff, object-list]
outputs: [findings-report]
bc-version: [26..28]
technologies: [al]
countries: [w1]
application-area: [all]
---

kind, id, version, title, description, inputs, outputs are required and specific to action skills.

bc-version, technologies, countries, application-area are optional filters that let an orchestrator pre-select applicable skills for a task. They follow the same semantics as in READ.

inputs is a list of abstract input types the skill accepts. Standard values: pr-diff, object-list, file-path, folder-path, repository, telemetry-query, development-plan, implementation-diff, decision-context, and consumed-guidance. Semantics are any-of: the orchestrator supplies whichever listed input types it has, and the skill is invoked with a non-empty subset of its declared inputs. A skill that cannot proceed with the supplied subset MUST return outcome: "not-applicable".

implementation-diff is the current patch or structured changed-file/source context, including exact affected files. decision-context identifies the current phase, bounded next decision, affected symbols, changed AL properties or tokens, tests or acceptance obligations, and stable decision/evidence identifiers. consumed-guidance is optional consumer-owned deduplication input; BCQuality does not persist it.

outputs is always a single-element list naming the output kind:

• findings-report — evaluates an input and reports defects or observations.
• development-guidance-report — selects and summarizes applicable BCQuality knowledge for an existing development plan without changing the target repository.
• implementation-guidance-report — selects focused, additional BCQuality knowledge for a current implementation or validation decision without changing the target repository.

file-path is one file. folder-path is a directory whose recursively contained files form the complete current-state input, such as a Business Central app folder containing app.json and AL source. The input value is the actual path, not merely the name of the input type. The agent MUST enumerate the folder rather than reducing it to one representative file.

Review skills use terms such as "diff", "changed files", and "changed code" as shorthand for the supplied review scope. For folder-path, every relevant file under the folder is in scope. A folder supplies no historical baseline: comparison-only rules MUST NOT infer a prior state that was not provided.

sub-skills is an optional field. When present and non-empty, the skill is a super-skill that composes other action skills; see Composition below. Values are repo-relative paths to action-skill files.

Required sections

Every action skill MUST contain these five sections, in order:

• ## Source — declares which folders and tags to search for knowledge.
• ## Relevance — declares how to filter the candidates.
• ## Worklist — declares how to narrow filtered candidates to the set that applies to this task.
• ## Action — declares what the skill does with the narrowed set.
• ## Output — declares the shape of the produced output; typically a reference to the contract below.

The four-step pattern

Source. List the folders and tag filters to collect candidates from. Sources span layers: an action skill sources from the same domain subfolder across every enabled layer. Example: "Source from /*/knowledge/performance/ and /*/knowledge/security/."

Relevance. Apply frontmatter filters to the candidates. Typical filters: match bc-version against the target environment, match technologies against the languages in scope, match countries and application-area against the consuming codebase's context. The exact matching rules are defined in READ (Frontmatter matching semantics). Files that do not match are discarded.

Worklist. Narrow the relevant candidates to the subset that applies to the current task. This is where the task-specific signal enters: the objects changed in the PR, the queries being audited, the existing plan being enriched. Typical moves: match keywords against task vocabulary, match file topics against changed objects, deduplicate by concern.

Action. Execute the skill's work against the worklist. Evaluate each item in the worklist against the task input and emit findings. The action step is where skill behavior differs; the preceding three steps are uniform.

Findings-report contract

An action skill with outputs: [findings-report] emits a single JSON document that conforms to this schema:

{
  "skill": { "id": "string", "version": 1 },
  "outcome": "completed | not-applicable | no-knowledge | partial | failed",
  "outcome-reason": "string",
  "summary": {
    "counts": { "blocker": 0, "major": 0, "minor": 0, "info": 0 },
    "coverage": { "worklist-size": 0, "items-evaluated": 0 }
  },
  "findings": [
    {
      "id": "string",
      "severity": "blocker | major | minor | info",
      "message": "string",
      "location": {
        "file": "string",
        "line": 0,
        "range": { "start-line": 0, "end-line": 0 }
      },
      "references": [
        { "path": "string", "sha": "string" }
      ],
      "confidence": "high | medium | low",
      "from-sub-skill": "string",
      "domain": "string",
      "suggested-code": "string",
      "suggested-code-omission-reason": "string"
    }
  ],
  "suppressed": [
    {
      "reference": { "path": "string", "sha": "string" },
      "reason": "layer-precedence | configuration"
    }
  ],
  "sub-results": [
    { "...full nested findings-report..." : null }
  ],
  "skipped-sub-skills": [
    {
      "skill": { "id": "string", "version": 1 },
      "reason": "configuration | not-applicable"
    }
  ]
}

JSON validity

The emitted document MUST be strict, valid JSON per RFC 8259. Inside every string value, all double quotes MUST be escaped as \" and all line breaks as \n; other control characters MUST use their JSON escapes. This is not optional polish — it is the difference between a parseable report and one a consumer silently drops.

AL source is the common failure case. Quoted identifiers (for example Rec."No.") and multi-line snippets routinely appear in message, suggested-code, and suggested-code-omission-reason, and each embedded quote or newline MUST be escaped when placed in a string value. A suggested-code payload that spans several lines is a single JSON string with \n separators, not a literal multi-line block. Emit the document as one JSON value with no trailing commentary, and do not rely on the consumer to repair unescaped output.

Field semantics

outcome (required) —

• completed — the skill ran end-to-end; findings reflects the full result (including the empty set).
• not-applicable — the skill's frontmatter filters did not match the task context; the skill declined to run.
• no-knowledge — the skill ran but found no applicable knowledge files; findings MUST be empty.
• partial — the skill evaluated part of its worklist but did not finish. summary.coverage reflects the evaluated subset. Set outcome-reason to explain.
• failed — the skill encountered an error and produced no reliable findings. Set outcome-reason. Consumers SHOULD ignore findings on a failed outcome.

outcome-reason is optional for completed, not-applicable, and no-knowledge; required for partial and failed.

An empty findings array with outcome: completed means the skill ran and found nothing to flag. Orchestrators MUST NOT conflate this with not-applicable or no-knowledge.

findings[].id — a stable identifier for the rule or concern that produced the finding. For citation-based findings (any finding with a non-empty references), id MUST equal references[0].path — the primary knowledge file's repo-relative path. For skills that detect concerns without a direct citation, id is a skill-defined slug (kebab-case, stable across versions of the skill). The same id produced in two runs MUST refer to the same concern; consumers MAY deduplicate findings by id.

When a super-skill rolls up a non-citation finding from a sub-skill (an id that is a slug, not a path), the super-skill MUST prefix the id with <from-sub-skill>: to avoid collisions across sub-skills (for example, a slug missing-test from al-security-review becomes al-security-review:missing-test). Citation-based findings are already globally unique through their repo-relative path and MUST NOT be rewritten.

Agent findings. A skill MAY emit findings that the agent identified through its own reasoning rather than from a BCQuality knowledge file. BCQuality is an additive knowledge layer: it augments the agent's pre-existing review judgement, it does not replace it. An agent finding is encoded by:

• references: [] — required. An agent finding has no knowledge-file citation by definition; if a citation existed, the finding would be a knowledge-backed finding instead.
• id — a skill-defined slug, prefixed with agent: (mirroring the <from-sub-skill>: rule). For example, agent:obsolete-find-signature.
• confidence — capped at medium. Without a knowledge-file citation there is no authoritative basis for high confidence.
• severity — capped at minor. Agent findings are advisory and non-gating: without a curated rule behind them they MUST NOT carry major or blocker weight, which the severity taxonomy reserves for gating defects. A genuinely severe issue the agent is confident about almost always matches an existing knowledge file (upgrading it to a knowledge-backed finding) or warrants authoring a new one — not a high-severity agent finding. When the underlying impact would otherwise be major or blocker, keep the emitted severity at minor but say so plainly in the message, and flag that the concern should be promoted to a knowledge-backed rule before it can gate.
• message — non-empty and self-contained. It MUST describe the issue and a concrete recommendation, since a consumer rendering the finding has no knowledge-file footer to fall back on.
• from-sub-skill — set by super-skills only. The literal string "agent" when the super-skill itself produced the finding from its own cross-cutting reasoning; or the producing leaf's skill.id when the super-skill is rolling up a leaf's agent finding. Absent on findings emitted directly by a leaf (the leaf's own report carries the finding under its skill.id already).

Precision bar — emit agent findings conservatively. Agent findings are the lowest-precision output BCQuality produces: there is no curated rule behind them, so a false positive costs reviewer trust with nothing to point back to. Hold them to a deliberately high bar:

• Emit only a concrete, demonstrable defect with material impact that a knowledgeable BC reviewer would agree is wrong — not merely different, suboptimal in theory, or not-how-I-would-write-it.
• Steelman before emitting. State the strongest case that the code is correct as written: a deliberate choice, a valid alternative, or behaviour that depends on code outside the diff. If that case is plausible, do not emit.
• Never emit as agent findings: stylistic or formatting preferences (outside a dedicated style skill's own domain); speculative or hypothetical concerns — anything you would phrase with "could", "might", or "consider"; issues that depend on code not visible in the diff; valid alternative approaches; or generic software-engineering advice a competent model already applies without prompting (the same exclusion the knowledge-file admission test enforces).
• When in doubt, omit. Recall is the knowledge files' responsibility; the agent channel exists only for the high-confidence, concrete defect the corpus has not captured yet. A missed low-severity observation is cheaper than a false positive.

Agent findings may be emitted by both leaf sub-skills and super-skills, with different scope boundaries:

• A leaf sub-skill MAY emit agent findings strictly within its declared domain. al-security-review MAY surface an agent security finding that no knowledge file covers (for example, a case over a security-relevant enum with no else arm), but MUST NOT emit a style or performance agent finding — those are out of scope for the leaf and belong to other leaves or to the super-skill. The leaf's domain is the bounding box.
• A super-skill MAY emit agent findings of any kind, but its self-review pass is most useful for cross-cutting concerns that span multiple leaf domains (architecture-level smells, error-handling gaps that touch security and reliability, resource lifecycle issues). Domain-specific agent reasoning is the leaves' job; the super-skill should not duplicate it.

Before emitting an agent finding, a skill MUST validate the candidate against the BCQuality knowledge it has already loaded for the task — if a knowledge file matches, the candidate is upgraded to a knowledge-backed finding (and merged or deduplicated against any existing finding that already covers the same concern); if a knowledge file explicitly contradicts the candidate, it is suppressed. For a super-skill rolling up leaf reports, this validation is done against the union of knowledge files all leaves loaded, not just one leaf's set.

Consumers that render output MAY treat agent findings differently from knowledge-backed findings (for example, by labelling them and routing them to a separate review domain). The references: [] marker, together with the agent: id prefix, is the contract they rely on; from-sub-skill: "agent" is the additional marker for super-skill-emitted agent findings.

findings[].severity — see the taxonomy below.

findings[].message — human-readable explanation of the finding. Single short paragraph. No markdown formatting assumptions.

Applicability is not a finding. Loading an article into the worklist only means its rule must be evaluated. If the changed code does not violate the article's normative guidance, emit nothing for that article. An info finding still requires a concrete observation defined by the article; skills MUST NOT use info to list guidance that merely happened to be relevant.

findings[].location — optional. When present:

• file MUST be a repo-relative path using forward slashes.
• line is the primary line number, 1-based.
• range is optional and describes a contiguous line span; start-line and end-line are 1-based and inclusive. start-line MUST equal line when both are present.

Findings without a location are permitted (for example, repository-wide observations).

findings[].references — array of knowledge-file references. Each reference is an object:

• path (required) — repo-relative path to the knowledge file, forward slashes.
• sha (optional) — commit SHA the skill read when producing the finding. Consumers SHOULD include sha when the skill was invoked with a specific repo state.

The first reference is the primary reference: the knowledge file the finding most directly cites. Additional references provide supporting context and are not ranked. references MAY be empty only for agent findings (see the findings[].id section above for the full encoding); any other finding MUST have at least one reference.

Reference-integrity gate (mandatory). A knowledge-backed finding may cite only a path copied verbatim from the current knowledge index or from a file discovered by the index fallback, and the skill must have opened that exact file in full before citing it. Never construct a plausible slug or infer a path from a topic name. Immediately before emitting the JSON document:

1. Verify every non-empty references[].path exists in the live checkout and was opened during this skill run.
2. Verify every citation-based findings[].id exactly equals references[0].path.
3. Remove any candidate that cannot satisfy both checks; it is not a knowledge-backed finding. Do not convert it into an agent finding merely to preserve it.
4. If reference integrity cannot be checked reliably, return outcome: "failed" rather than emitting fabricated or unverified citations.

This gate applies independently to every leaf result and again to a super-skill's rolled-up result.

findings[].confidence — the skill's confidence that the finding is a true positive, given the evidence it evaluated. Not applicability confidence, not severity confidence. Values: high, medium, low.

findings[].from-sub-skill — optional. Set only by super-skills. The skill.id of the sub-skill that produced the finding, or the literal string "agent" for an agent finding the super-skill produced from its own cross-cutting reasoning. Absent on findings emitted directly by a leaf skill — including agent findings the leaf emits within its own domain, which appear in the leaf's own report without this field.

findings[].domain — optional in the shared schema for backward compatibility and for non-review findings. It is a short, human-readable display label for the review domain that produced the finding (for example, Security, Breaking Changes, API & Web Services). A review leaf skill MUST set it on every finding it emits. The value MUST be a non-empty, single-line string with no leading or trailing whitespace or control characters. Internal whitespace, punctuation, case, and non-ASCII characters are valid and significant.

A review super-skill MUST preserve domain verbatim when rolling a leaf finding into its top-level findings[], including preserving its absence from older producers, and MUST set it to "Agent" for agent findings it emits about cross-cutting concerns. Consumers MUST tolerate its absence. When rendering a present value, consumers MUST preserve the complete display text, escaping only as required by the output format; they MUST NOT split it on whitespace or restrict it to identifier characters. domain is display text, not a stable machine identifier. If a consumer embeds it in metadata or uses it in a deduplication key, it MUST retain the exact string, use a lossless encoding, or use a collision-resistant digest; it MUST NOT rely on lowercasing or lossy slugification as the sole identity.

findings[].suggested-code — optional in the schema but expected for mechanical findings. It is a concrete code-replacement payload for the lines indicated by location. When present, the string MUST be a literal replacement for the source lines covered by location.line (or location.range if set) — i.e., what the file would contain after the fix, with no surrounding diff markers, fences, or commentary. Consumers MAY render it as a one-click suggestion in the delivery surface (for example, a GitHub ```suggestion block).

Emit suggested-code whenever the fix is small, local, and mechanical: deleting unreachable code; replacing one expression (Count() > 0 → not IsEmpty()); adding a missing property such as ToolTip, OptionCaption, or DataClassification; replacing a string-concatenated Error with a Label-backed call; changing a permission token; or adding a missing else/guard branch whose replacement is unambiguous from the surrounding diff. When a .good.al companion exists and the diff context matches the .bad.al shape, prefer adapting the .good.al replacement into suggested-code.

Omit suggested-code only when the appropriate fix depends on context the skill cannot determine, when multiple defensible replacements exist, or when the fix spans non-contiguous code. If a finding is mechanical-looking but suggested-code is omitted, set findings[].suggested-code-omission-reason to a short explanation (for example, requires choosing a real event id or fix spans multiple non-contiguous locations). The suggested-code payload supplements message; it does not replace the explanation in message.

findings[].suggested-code-omission-reason — optional. Required when a finding is mechanical-looking but suggested-code is omitted. Short, human-readable reason explaining why no safe one-click replacement was emitted. Consumers MAY use this for telemetry or diagnostics; they do not have to render it in review comments.

suppressed — MUST list every knowledge file that was discarded due to layer precedence or consumer configuration, whenever that file would otherwise have contributed to the worklist. Each entry contains:

• reference — the suppressed file (same object shape as findings[].references).
• reason — layer-precedence when another layer won under READ's precedence rules; configuration when the consumer disabled the file's layer.

sub-results — super-skills only. Array of complete findings-reports, one per sub-skill that was invoked (i.e., every sub-skill not listed in skipped-sub-skills). Each entry MUST itself conform to this output contract. Entries MUST appear in the worklist's declared order, regardless of invocation or completion order. Leaf skills MUST NOT emit sub-results.

skipped-sub-skills — super-skills only. Array of sub-skills that were declared in frontmatter but not invoked. reason is configuration when the orchestrator disabled the sub-skill, or not-applicable when the super-skill's Relevance step ruled it out.

Severity taxonomy:

• blocker — violates platform-level guarantees; the work cannot proceed as-is.
• major — significant defect; should be fixed before merge.
• minor — quality concern; worth flagging but not a gate.
• info — observation or context; not actionable on its own.

Development-guidance-report contract

An action skill with outputs: [development-guidance-report] emits one JSON document:

{
  "skill": { "id": "string", "version": 1 },
  "outcome": "completed | not-applicable | no-knowledge | partial | failed",
  "outcome-reason": "string",
  "summary": {
    "request": "string",
    "kind": "feature | bug | refactor | upgrade | maintenance",
    "candidates": 0,
    "selected": 0
  },
  "context": {
    "bc-version": "string",
    "technologies": ["string"],
    "countries": ["string"],
    "application-area": ["string"],
    "unknown": ["bc-version | technologies | countries | application-area"]
  },
  "knowledge": [
    {
      "path": "string",
      "sha": "string",
      "used-for": "string",
      "constraints": ["string"],
      "sample-paths": ["string"]
    }
  ],
  "validation-considerations": [
    {
      "id": "string",
      "reason": "string",
      "evidence": "string"
    }
  ],
  "suppressed": [
    {
      "reference": { "path": "string", "sha": "string" },
      "reason": "layer-precedence | configuration"
    }
  ],
  "unresolved": ["string"]
}

The skill is read-only with respect to the target repository: no edits, generated files, staging, commits, or publication. Keep index, report, and scratch artifacts outside that repository. The report is strict JSON with no surrounding commentary. The caller supplies an existing plan and repository; consumer-specific input normalization and workflow state are outside this contract.

Guidance outcome semantics

• completed — evaluation finished, at least one article was selected, every selected article was opened and faithfully converted into constraints, and no materially unresolved conditional guidance remains.
• not-applicable — the required existing plan or readable repository is absent, or the task is outside the skill's applicability. No constraints are claimed.
• no-knowledge — evaluation finished and there are no additional applicable BCQuality constraints for this plan. knowledge is empty. This is not a statement that the work is unsafe or unimplementable; the consuming workflow can proceed under its ordinary gates. Do not add generic or filler articles to avoid this outcome.
• partial — evaluation is incomplete or conditional guidance remains materially unresolved. Name each gap in outcome-reason and unresolved; do not silently treat an unknown dimension as a match.
• failed — retrieval, reference integrity, or another error prevents a reliable report. Set outcome-reason; consumers must not treat the result as reliable constraints or as no-knowledge.

outcome-reason is required for partial and failed, optional otherwise. These outcomes describe enrichment only, not permission to implement or deliver. The consumer owns handling of partial, failed, and unresolved guidance, including escalation, clarification, and re-enrichment; BCQuality does not impose a universal implementation gate.

Guidance field semantics

summary.request preserves the planned intent and kind classifies it without replacing the plan. candidates and selected are non-negative integer counts: selected equals the number of unique knowledge entries and cannot exceed candidates. Counts are retrieval diagnostics, not capability or authoring-quality scores.

knowledge[].constraints is a non-empty list summarizing only normative ## Best Practice and ## Anti Pattern content from the referenced article. It must not introduce a Business Central fact absent from that article. used-for names the concrete plan decision. sample-paths contains only sibling samples that exist and were opened. All paths use forward slashes, are repository-relative, and must resolve inside the recorded BCQuality checkout; absolute paths, traversal, and links escaping that checkout are invalid. Every reference is subject to the reference-integrity gate.

validation-considerations states evidence the implementation workflow should obtain; it does not claim that a command or test has run. suppressed has the same shape and semantics as in a findings-report. unresolved records missing repository context or plan decisions that prevent a reliable constraint. Unknown applicability dimensions must appear in both context.unknown and a relevant unresolved entry, explaining whether they materially affect a candidate. An unknown dimension is not itself a failure or proof that relevant knowledge exists.

Reference SHAs, when present, identify the files read; they do not prove runtime pinning on their own. The consumer records and verifies the actual immutable BCQuality checkout used for both enrichment and final review, plus its filtering policy and run provenance outside the target repository. See agent-consumption.md.

Implementation-guidance-report contract

An action skill with outputs: [implementation-guidance-report] emits one JSON document:

{
  "skill": { "id": "al-implementation-guidance", "version": 1 },
  "outcome": "completed | not-applicable | no-knowledge | partial | failed",
  "outcome-reason": "string",
  "summary": {
    "request": "string",
    "phase": "string",
    "decision": "string",
    "decision-key": "string",
    "evidence-fingerprint": "string",
    "candidates": 0,
    "selected": 0,
    "omitted-consumed": 0
  },
  "pins": {
    "knowledge-checkout": "full commit SHA | unpinned",
    "development-plan": "consumer-supplied id/version/digest | unpinned",
    "implementation-evidence": "consumer-supplied id/digest | unpinned"
  },
  "context": {
    "bc-version": "string",
    "technologies": ["string"],
    "countries": ["string"],
    "application-area": ["string"],
    "affected-files": ["string"],
    "affected-symbols": ["string"],
    "changed-tokens": ["string"],
    "unknown": ["bc-version | technologies | countries | application-area"]
  },
  "knowledge": [
    {
      "path": "string",
      "sha": "string",
      "used-for": "string",
      "constraints": ["string"],
      "sample-paths": ["string"]
    }
  ],
  "validation-considerations": [
    { "id": "string", "reason": "string", "evidence": "string" }
  ],
  "deduplication": {
    "strategy": "omit-exact-consumed-match",
    "omitted": [
      {
        "path": "string",
        "decision-key": "string",
        "evidence-fingerprint": "string",
        "prior-decision": "string"
      }
    ]
  },
  "suppressed": [
    {
      "reference": { "path": "string", "sha": "string" },
      "reason": "layer-precedence | configuration"
    }
  ],
  "unresolved": ["string"]
}

The report is strict JSON with no surrounding commentary and is read-only with respect to both the target repository and consumer workflow state. Index, report, and scratch artifacts stay outside the target.

summary is the compact current phase/decision record. Its decision key and evidence fingerprint are copied from decision-context, not generated by the skill. pins preserves consumer-supplied plan and implementation identifiers; knowledge-checkout is the actual checkout SHA only when established, otherwise unpinned. A pin records identity, not safety or correctness. candidates is the number of unique relevant articles before consumed-guidance omission, so selected + omitted-consumed cannot exceed it.

context.affected-files, affected-symbols, and changed-tokens contain exact current implementation evidence, not broad planned domains. Paths use forward slashes and are repository-relative. The knowledge, validation, suppression, unknown-context, and reference-integrity rules from development-guidance-report apply unchanged.

deduplication.strategy is always omit-exact-consumed-match. An omitted entry must exactly match a supplied consumed article path, decision key, and evidence fingerprint. Its path is absent from knowledge. summary.omitted-consumed equals deduplication.omitted.length. A changed decision key or evidence fingerprint permits the article to be selected again. The consumer owns and persists consumed state; BCQuality remains stateless.

completed requires at least one selected article, complete evaluation, and no material unresolved applicability. not-applicable means a required readable repository, plan, implementation diff, or decision context is missing or the task is outside applicability. no-knowledge requires empty knowledge and means no additional applicable constraints for this exact decision/evidence; it is not a functional-correctness, safety, completeness, or release claim. partial keeps incomplete evaluation or materially unresolved applicability explicit. failed covers retrieval, reference-integrity, or other errors. outcome-reason is required for partial and failed.

Composition (super-skills)

A super-skill is an action skill whose frontmatter declares a non-empty sub-skills: [...]. A super-skill does not evaluate knowledge files directly; it invokes other action skills and composes their output.

Composition is flat: a super-skill MAY list only leaf skills (skills without their own sub-skills). Nested super-skills are not permitted in v1.

Scheduling boundary

The super-skill defines which leaves must run, the input and output contracts, and how their results are composed. It does not prescribe a model, concurrency limit, retry policy, or telemetry system. Those choices belong to the orchestrator.

Each leaf invocation MUST remain a discrete evaluation with its own complete findings-report. An orchestrator MAY execute independent leaves serially or concurrently, but MUST invoke every worklisted leaf, preserve sub-results in the declared worklist order, and wait for every invocation to finish before performing any super-skill self-review or final rollup. Scheduling MUST NOT change relevance, coverage, failure, reference-integrity, or output semantics.

Section interpretation for super-skills

The five required sections still apply. Their meaning shifts from knowledge files to sub-skills:

• ## Source — names the sub-skills invoked (mirrors sub-skills in frontmatter).
• ## Relevance — rules for deciding which sub-skills apply to the current task. A sub-skill is relevant when its declared inputs are satisfied by the orchestrator's provided inputs and the orchestrator has not disabled it via configuration. The super-skill MUST NOT filter sub-skills by task content (for example, by inspecting the diff or the file). Task-level applicability is the sub-skill's own responsibility; sub-skills signal non-applicability by returning outcome: "not-applicable" or outcome: "no-knowledge".
• ## Worklist — the final list of sub-skills to invoke; the rest go to skipped-sub-skills.
• ## Action — invoke each worklisted sub-skill with the appropriate subset of inputs, collect its findings-report verbatim into sub-results, and copy its findings[] into the super-skill's top-level findings[] with from-sub-skill set. All finding fields, including the optional domain, are preserved verbatim unless this contract explicitly requires a transformation. Findings from a sub-skill with outcome: "failed" MUST NOT be copied into the super-skill's top-level findings[] and MUST NOT contribute to the super-skill's summary.counts (their report is still preserved in sub-results for traceability, consistent with DO's rule that consumers ignore a failed skill's findings).
• ## Output — the super-skill's output contract, including sub-results and, if any, skipped-sub-skills.

Outcome rollup

A super-skill's outcome is derived from its sub-skills' outcomes. Let S be the multiset of sub-skill outcomes for sub-skills in the worklist (skipped sub-skills do not contribute):

• failed — every element of S is failed.
• partial — S contains at least one partial, OR S contains at least one failed alongside at least one non-failed outcome.
• not-applicable — every element of S is not-applicable.
• no-knowledge — every element of S is no-knowledge or not-applicable, and at least one is no-knowledge.
• completed — otherwise (every element of S is completed, no-knowledge, or not-applicable, with at least one completed).

When the worklist is empty (every sub-skill was skipped), outcome is not-applicable; outcome-reason SHOULD describe the skip reasons, for example "all sub-skills disabled by configuration" or "no sub-skill accepted the supplied inputs".

outcome-reason is required for partial and failed and SHOULD summarize per-sub-skill state.

Rolled-up summary

summary.counts counts the findings in the super-skill's final top-level findings[], after failed sub-results have been excluded and duplicates have been merged. It MUST NOT be calculated by summing sub-skill counts, because the same concern may appear in more than one sub-result.

summary.coverage.worklist-size and items-evaluated are the sums across invoked sub-skills whose outcomes are not failed.

Suppression scope

A super-skill's top-level suppressed[] remains knowledge-file-only and is typically empty. Knowledge-file suppression is reported by the leaf sub-skill inside its own entry in sub-results. Sub-skills the super-skill chose not to invoke belong in skipped-sub-skills, never in suppressed.

Worked example

A minimal action skill that reviews a changed AL file against applicable guidance. Relevance alone never produces a finding:

---
kind: action-skill
id: review-applicable-guidance
version: 1
title: Review applicable guidance
description: Reviews a changed AL file against applicable knowledge.
inputs: [file-path]
outputs: [findings-report]
technologies: [al]
---

## Source
All files under `/*/knowledge/` across enabled layers.

## Relevance
Filter by `technologies: [al]` and `bc-version` matching the target environment.

## Worklist
Intersect `keywords` with tokens derived from the target file's object name and changed members.

## Action
Read each worklisted article in full and compare its normative guidance to the
input. Emit a finding only for a concrete violation or an observation the
article explicitly defines, with justified severity, evidence, and a reference
copied from the discovered article path. Do not report an article merely
because it was relevant. If every item was evaluated and none warrants a
finding, return `completed` with an empty `findings` array.

## Output
Conforms to the DO output contract.

How orchestrators consume output

An orchestrator invokes an action skill with an input appropriate to the skill's declared inputs and uses the single output kind declared in frontmatter. It maps a findings-report to PR comments, build gates, or IDE diagnostics; a development-guidance-report to constraints for an existing plan; and an implementation-guidance-report to focused constraints for the next current decision. The consumer retains ownership of implementation and delivery.