Skill doctor

Skill-Doctor

Diagnose a skill library. Find skills whose descriptions compete for the same prompts, then fix the routing.

When to run

• You installed many skills and "the wrong one keeps firing"
• Before publishing a skill pack (catch collisions reviewers will hit)
• After adding a skill (does it collide with an existing one?)
• Periodic health check on a growing library

Input

Point the engine at EITHER:

• A directory of skills (<root>/<name>/SKILL.md), or
• A Claude Code manifest.json (skills-plugin/.../manifest.json)

How to run

The engine lives in scripts/ next to this file. Zero dependencies (Python 3.8+ stdlib).

# From the directory containing this SKILL.md:
python3 -m scripts <path-to-skills-or-manifest>            # Markdown report
python3 -m scripts <path> --format json --out report.json # machine output
python3 -m scripts <path> --fail-on critical               # CI gate (exit 1)

Common options:

• --merge-at 0.55 — collision score that triggers a MERGE recommendation
• --disambig-at 0.30 — score that triggers a DISAMBIGUATE recommendation
• --vague-threshold 0.5 — flag descriptions vaguer than this
• --top 12 — how many top collisions to list
• --format md|json|both

What it detects (issue codes)

Code	Severity	Meaning
DUPLICATE_TRIGGER	🔴	Same trigger phrase claimed by 2+ skills (top cause of mis-routing)
DUPLICATE_NAME	🔴	Two skills share a name
MISSING_DESCRIPTION	🔴	Skill can never trigger reliably
HIGH_OVERLAP	🔴/🟠	Two descriptions are semantically too close
VAGUE_DESCRIPTION	🟠	Filler-heavy, no "use when", no triggers
NAME_DIR_MISMATCH	🟠	name ≠ directory (breaks the spec)
BAD_NAME_FORMAT	🟠	name breaks lowercase/hyphen rules
DESC_TOO_SHORT / DESC_TOO_LONG	🟠/🟡	Outside 40–1024 chars
NO_BOUNDARY	🟡	No "For X, see <other>" cross-reference
BODY_TOO_LONG	🔵	SKILL.md body > 500 lines

How scoring works (one line)

collision = 0.50·cosine(TF-IDF of descriptions)
          + 0.35·jaccard(trigger phrases)
          + 0.15·jaccard(domain keywords)

Bands: <0.22 LOW · 0.22 MEDIUM · 0.38 HIGH · 0.55 CRITICAL. See references/scoring.md for the full rationale.

Workflow for the agent

1. Run the engine on the user's skills path → read the Markdown report.
2. Summarize the health score, the worst clusters, and duplicate triggers.
3. For each top recommendation, propose the concrete edit:
   • MERGE → draft one combined description, suggest the surviving name.
   • ABSORB → name the skill to delete and where its triggers move.
   • DISAMBIGUATE → write the two mirror boundary lines ("For X, see Y.").
4. Offer to apply the description rewrites (edit each SKILL.md frontmatter).
5. Re-run to confirm the health score improved.

Output

• A Markdown report: health score, top collisions, confusable clusters, duplicate-trigger table, recommendations, full issue list, ASCII heatmap.
• Optional JSON (--format json) for CI gates or other tools.

Rules

• The engine is read-only — it never edits skills. Rewrites are applied by the agent (you) only after the user approves.
• Never delete a skill without explicit confirmation.
• When rewriting descriptions, preserve every real trigger phrase the user relies on; only move/disambiguate them — don't drop them.

See references/methodology.md for the algorithm and references/issue-catalog.md for how to fix each issue type.