| name | aced-architect-impl |
| description | Partial Skill: invoke by name only — the ACED Architect bar at the impl gate — whether an agent-configuration artifact is well-formed as configuration. Loaded by the ACED impl-producer to self-align and by the impl-judge to grade. Not triggered by users directly. |
| user-invocable | false |
| metadata | {"actor":"architect","gate":"impl","compose":"union"} |
ACED Architect-Impl Governance — the agent-config shape bar
The Architect bar at the impl gate, specialized for agent-configuration artifact-types
(skill, subagent, command, agents-section). It unions onto
sdd:architect-impl-governance — the generic structural-fit bar still applies; this adds what makes
an artifact well-formed as configuration a model loads and executes.
The sibling aced:aced-builder-impl asks whether the artifact passes its frozen .feature. This
bar asks a question the eval suite cannot: whether the artifact is shaped so a model can act on it.
An artifact can pass every scenario and still be unusable configuration.
The bar (per artifact)
- Agent-first body. Dense normative rules the agent executes without opening a linked file
first. A body that defers its own content to a repo path is not self-contained: the model has to
stop and fetch before it can act. Optional depth belongs in a closing
## References — a
governance show command, an external HTTPS URL, or a sibling file in the same skill folder.
Fail: a mid-workflow link to another repository file.
- No rationale prose. No
## Why, ## Rationale, ## Background, or ## Context section, and
no causal "because…" explanation in the body. A one-line scope at the top ("Apply when…") is
allowed. Rationale lives in an ADR, which outlives the artifact and is read by people rather than
loaded into every invocation. Fail: a body that argues for its rules instead of stating them.
- Decisions over documentation. The artifact encodes what to decide and how. It does not restate
generic best practice, API documentation, or anything the model derives without it. Fail:
a section that would be equally true in any repository.
- One workflow, one artifact. A single workflow per artifact, with the selection mechanism
declared in the
description — matched against a situation, named by a caller, or fired by an
event. A name-only artifact carries the description "By name only" and nothing else, because the
description is the only surface the model matches on and every added word is another handle for a
spurious match. Fail: a second workflow smuggled in under a heading; identity prose in a
name-only description.
- Selection is not visibility.
user-invocable controls whether the artifact appears in the
user's command list, never how it is selected. Fail: a bar, judge, or body that reads
user-invocable: false as "not situationally triggered".
- No baked-in opinions. The artifact detects the user's setup — package manager, monorepo shape,
editor, OS paths — at runtime rather than assuming one stack. A genuinely stack-specific artifact
says so in its
description. Fail: a hardcoded assumption presented as universal.
- An orthogonal axis. This bar judges a property the eval suite was not optimizing. A finding
here is not answerable by adding a scenario.
Scope across the artifact-types
The criteria above hold for all four types. Where a type has its own additional shape rules, they
are not restated here:
| Artifact-type | Additional contract |
|---|
skill | cyberplace governance show skill-design — frontmatter fields, activation, progressive disclosure, skill.json, placement and patterns |
skill (repo layout) | cyberplace governance show skill-repo-structure |
subagent, command, agents-section | no separate shipped contract; this bar is the whole agent-config shape bar for them |
Gaps are CONTENT_GAP, never guesses
An artifact whose intended selection mechanism cannot be determined from its description returns a
CONTENT_GAP. Do not infer the mechanism from user-invocable, from the folder it sits in, or from
whether it happens to be reachable — inferring is the exact error the selection-is-not-visibility
criterion exists to catch.
References
cyberplace governance show skill-design — the full skill authoring contract this bar's criteria
are drawn from; read stdout as authoritative.cyberplace governance show skill-repo-structure — repository layout for shipped skills.
