Vowline

Universal operating skill: bind the public task, act from evidence, preserve boundaries, and verify the delivered result.

Vowline is a portable SKILL.md package for Codex, Claude Code, Windsurf, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, and other skill-compatible agent harnesses. It gives agents the compact operating contract in skills/vowline/SKILL.md: bind the target and future client once, convert visible requirements into predicates over the final surface, preserve public labels and source-backed entity boundaries, prefer native structured tools, edit only the smallest live write set, and verify the delivered surface through the same interface a real user or official consumer will use.

Use it for substantive work with a real deliverable, constraints, evidence requirements, cleanup risk, data interpretation, artifact fidelity, repository scope, or completion criteria. Vowline never overrides higher-priority system, tool, safety, project, or explicit user instructions.

Current benchmark snapshot

A deterministic benchmark snapshot for the exact Vowline 0.7.0 skill body (6057fa00a6c074fe2af5f28b0a11062e69e154acf6296d4c65eb8b63f1cd637c) passes 12 / 13 checked tasks (92.3%) at gpt-5.5 with xhigh reasoning effort. The completed public/verifier-backed rows span SkillsBench, IFEval, LiveBench, and Terminal-Bench; nginx-request-logging is the only open task. This is mostly single-run deterministic verifier evidence, not a pass@2 score or repeated-stability claim. No proxy judges, no LLM-as-judge, no mixed-hash rows, and no all-pass claim. See 6057fa00_benchmark_snapshot.md for the exact rows and result artifact paths. The earlier 0.6.0 failure-only comparison remains archived at 8e427bb4_no_skill_comparison.md.

This is not a benchmark-overfit skill. The tested Vowline contract is a general operating discipline: target and future-client binding, final-surface predicates, public-label preservation, declared-source entity boundaries, scoped live writes, native structured tools, faithful consumer proof, and explicit reporting. It forbids encoding unavailable private facts, hidden tests, private fixtures, benchmark quirks, known answers, one-off paths, measurement tricks, hardcoded outputs, or verifier workarounds.

Quick start

The easiest path is to ask the target agent to install Vowline for itself:

Install Vowline for yourself by following https://github.com/chojondocho/vowline/blob/main/INSTALL.md. Verify installation.

For a project-local install, ask from inside the project:

Install Vowline into this project by following https://github.com/chojondocho/vowline/blob/main/INSTALL.md. Use project-local paths. Verify installation.

To update an existing install after a Vowline release or contract change:

Update Vowline for yourself by following https://github.com/chojondocho/vowline/blob/main/UPDATE.md. Verify the update.

You do not need to clone this repository if your agent can read GitHub and write the relevant local files. Vowline is designed to be installed by agents as well as by humans.

What Vowline changes