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, generate a skeleton — 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. The files in /skills/ — the three meta-skill contracts (READ, DO, WRITE) and the entry-point skill (entry.md, kind: entry-point) — are the only skills that sit outside a layer. The entry-point skill structurally follows this same four-step pattern but produces a dispatch record rather than a findings-report; see skills/entry.md for its contract.

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, repository, telemetry-query. 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". outputs is always a single-element list naming the output kind; today only findings-report is defined.

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 skeleton being generated. 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.

Output contract

Every action skill 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"
    }
  ],
  "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"
    }
  ]
}

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 super-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:

• from-sub-skill: "agent" — the canonical marker. Use this exact value; do not invent equivalents.
• 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.
• 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.

Agent findings are emitted only by super-skills (the al-code-review super-skill is the canonical example). Leaf sub-skills MUST NOT emit agent findings: a leaf's job is to evaluate one knowledge subset, and a finding it cannot cite from that subset is out of scope for it. Before emitting an agent finding, a super-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 sub-skill output that already covers the same concern); if a knowledge file explicitly contradicts the candidate, it is suppressed.

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 from-sub-skill: "agent" marker is the contract they rely on.

findings[].severity — see the taxonomy below.

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

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.

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 reasoning. Absent on findings produced directly by a leaf skill.

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. 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.

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.

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. 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 is the sum of sub-skill counts. summary.coverage.worklist-size and items-evaluated are the sums across invoked sub-skills.

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 cites applicable guidance for a changed AL file, without generating findings of its own:

---
kind: action-skill
id: cite-applicable-guidance
version: 1
title: Cite applicable guidance
description: Lists knowledge files relevant to a changed AL file.
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
For each worklist entry, emit one finding with severity `info`, a message naming the concern, and a reference object pointing to the knowledge file.

## 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, receives the JSON output, and maps findings to its delivery surface (PR comments, build gates, IDE diagnostics). The orchestrator MUST NOT interpret skill-specific fields beyond the schema above. Skills that need richer semantics MUST encode them within the schema (for example, by adding structured message text) rather than extending the output shape.