v2.2.0 — duck-shape

duck-shape

A new skill: shape code by the concepts a reader must hold to change it safely — never line count, never nesting depth.

The distinction that makes it different from a size metric: depth is not the defect. A five-level hierarchy where every level names what it is for is cheap; two levels called Manager and Helper are expensive, and no nesting metric tells them apart. The target is clarity, not flatness.

It cuts both ways, which a lines-of-code lens cannot: a golfed one-liner is fewer lines and more held facts. A regex replacing a named parser is one line, and the reader now holds the grammar.

Top of the measure is "does this concept need to exist at all?" — deleting a concept outranks naming it well. Deleting two hundred lines that were one concept removes one held fact; deleting a single line that was a mode flag removes a held fact from every reader of every branch downstream.

Roles

• duck-shape — the doer, at change time
• duck-roast angle 2 — the same lens at milestone altitude, with churn as evidence on a finding, never a rank
• duck-review — reports what change time missed

duck-run: eight stages to six

duck-shape and duck-dry moved from separate stages into the per-unit cycle inside Execute: failing test, minimal pass, shape, dry. They belong there because the diff is not committed yet — the one window where neither costs ceremony. Defer them and shaping becomes a restructure, drying becomes a sweep, and both then need their own commit and their own trip through the gate.

Gate

• Required cross-references must exist, not merely resolve. A load-bearing link could previously be deleted with the whole gate green.
• Skill descriptions are bounded — every host loads all of them, every session.
• A directory under skills/ with no SKILL.md is reported rather than silently uncounted.

Also

duck-break owns "red team it"; duck-shape owns "duck simplification"; trigger descriptions normalized across the collection.