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Contributing Skills

Manuel Gil edited this page Jul 27, 2026 · 1 revision

Contributing Skills

This document defines operational contribution principles for Weave Skills.

The repository intentionally favors:

few dense operational overlays

rather than:

many fragmented conceptual overlays

See Architecture for canonical architectural invariants.

Core Principle

A skill should represent a distinct, triggerable operational capability mode — not a taxonomy node, plugin system, or philosophical fragment. Strong skills stabilize trigger behavior, overlap handling, contextual continuity, and workflow survivability.

What A Skill Is

A skill modifies:

  • contextual reasoning
  • operational heuristics
  • implementation awareness
  • continuity behavior
  • workflow interpretation

Skills behave as portable operational capabilities inside filesystem-native workflows.

What A Skill Is NOT

A skill is NOT:

  • a runtime
  • an orchestration layer
  • a command system
  • a semantic index
  • a graph engine
  • a repository ownership model

Skills intentionally remain:

bounded
operational
filesystem-aware
implementation-grounded

Canonical architectural boundaries are defined in:

Existing Skill Surface

Current skills intentionally remain small and dense.

Skill Responsibility
knowledge-construction durable operational understanding
implementation-investigation evidence-backed implementation investigation
operational-memory survivable continuation state
locality-recovery workspace topology reconstruction

Contributors SHOULD preserve this density model.

Before Creating A Skill

Before introducing a new skill, contributors SHOULD ask:

Does this represent a genuinely distinct operational capability mode?

If unclear, prefer extending an existing skill.

Good Skill Characteristics

Strong skills are typically:

  • operationally specific
  • contextually dense
  • low-overlap
  • implementation-grounded
  • triggerable
  • workflow-oriented
  • composition-safe

Good skills usually modify one of:

  • reasoning behavior
  • continuity behavior
  • contextual interpretation
  • operational heuristics

Anti-Patterns

Avoid:

  • capability fragmentation (split behaviors belong inside knowledge-construction or existing skills)
  • taxonomy inflation (many narrowly-scoped skill names)
  • repository semanticization (global ontology or graph-index skills)

These patterns create overlap, ambiguity, and unstable activation.

Composition Boundaries

Contributors SHOULD minimize:

  • overlap
  • duplicated semantics
  • broad triggers
  • conceptual fragmentation
  • repository-global activation
  • capability contamination

Composition guidance is documented in Skill Composition.

Filesystem Authority

Skills MUST preserve filesystem authority and SHOULD NOT semanticize repositories or replace filesystem organization. Canonical filesystem invariants are defined in Architecture.

Semantic Scope

Skills MUST respect bounded semantic scope. Recommended semantic root:

.context/notes

Only files inside semantic scope participate in symbolic semantics. Core invariant:

semantic scope != filesystem scope

Canonical semantic scope behavior is defined in Semantic Scope.

Runtime Boundaries

Skills intentionally DO NOT preserve runtime invariants or serialize canonical structures. Skills influence contextual reasoning, continuity behavior, implementation grounding, and operational heuristics. Canonical runtime boundaries are defined in Runtime Boundaries.

Implementation Grounding

Contributors SHOULD prioritize implementation-grounded operational continuity rather than abstract semantic knowledge systems. Implementation grounding behavior is documented in Implementation Tracing.

Long-Running Operational Continuity

The repository optimizes for long-running engineering operational continuity inside real repositories. Strong skills improve continuity, recovery, traceability, unresolved state survivability, and implementation-aware workflows across sessions and tools.

Recommended Skill Structure

Recommended repository structure:

skill-name/
└── SKILL.md

Related Documents

Weave Skills Wiki

Overview

Core Concepts

Implementation Grounding

Interoperability

Contribution

Clone this wiki locally