Authoring Verifiable Skills

Core principle. A skill that does not activate does nothing, and a skill nobody has watched fail proves nothing. Changing one that already exists, against evidence that it underperforms, belongs to optimising-skills.

• Those two failures are silent. Both look exactly like a skill that works.
• The weight sits in the activation surface and the gate. Everything after them improves a skill that is already being reached.
• You opened this in the middle of something. This is how to do that work, not a replacement for it. Name what you were doing before you start, and return to it when this is done.

Read the rule whose signal is in front of you

This table is a gate, not a checklist. Match the left column against what you are about to write or repair.

• One rule per row. Enter at the matched row.
• An axis whose signal is absent is reported as not-applicable, naming the signal that would have triggered it.
• Read both rows where the work matches two. Reading is the cheap half.
• An index whose default is "read them all" is a table of contents with extra steps.
• Read every row, then act on the matches, hardest to undo first. Reading a row costs nothing; the row you skipped is where the coverage went.