Forward implementation first

An agent skill that stops a coding agent from getting stuck servicing its own paperwork.

Long-running agent pipelines grow bookkeeping: content hashes, lock files, "receipts" that prove a stage ran, certification markers, dashboard rows, progress metadata. None of that is the product. All of it is easy for a model to mistake for the product. Once that happens the agent stops shipping and starts curating, and you pay full price for an agent that produces nothing you asked for.

This skill gives the agent one classification to make before every action, and a short list of things it is never allowed to do. It is about 150 lines of Markdown. It is model-agnostic, tool-agnostic, and domain-agnostic.

The failure mode

You have a pipeline with ordered stages. Stage 40 produces a file that stage 41 consumes. Somewhere along the way the orchestrator also writes a small JSON record saying stage 40 completed, with a hash of its inputs.

Then you change one producer. The hash no longer matches. Here is what an agent does without this skill:

• It notices the mismatch and treats it as a correctness failure, because a mismatch looks like one.
• It invalidates stages 12 through 40, because it cannot prove which of them the change touched, and invalidating more feels safer.
• It refuses to run stage 41 by hand, because the pipeline "cannot issue a receipt" for a manual run.
• It spends the next several hours regenerating markers for stages whose output never changed and was never wrong.
• It reports progress in terms of receipts repaired, which reads like work.

Nothing in that sequence is stupid in isolation. Each step is a defensible local decision. Together they cost days, and the output at the end is identical to the output you already had. The pathology is that administrative metadata is being used as a proxy for correctness, and the proxy is both cheaper to check and completely uninformative.

The second half of the failure mode is worse: the agent tells you it cannot proceed. You then go run the stage yourself, or open a second agent to do it, and the first agent sits there guarding a hash.

What the skill does

Before each action, the agent classifies it as one of three things:

1. Semantic implementation. Builds or connects a producer, consumer, adapter, runtime path, schema, fixture, or final output.
2. Focused validation. Tests the changed dependency cone through behavior, schema, counts, ordered samples, conservation, consistency, nontruncation, and measured time and memory.
3. Administrative bookkeeping. Generates or repairs hashes, locks, receipts, dashboards, certification markers, progress metadata, or presence-only records.

Do 1 and 2. Skip 3 unless the user asks for it, or the artifact is part of the product. When category 3 blocks a path without protecting correctness, delete the dependency.

That is the whole idea. The rest of SKILL.md makes it hard to weasel out of, because a model that wants to do bookkeeping will find a reason.

What it does not relax

This is the part that makes the skill safe to install, and the part most "just move faster" prompts get wrong. Bookkeeping is cheap to skip. Evidence is not. The skill explicitly preserves: