| name | skill-staleness-audit |
| description | Score every SKILL.md in the marketplace against staleness signals (last-edit age, eval coverage, citation freshness, frontmatter compliance) and emit a ranked report. Read-only — never modifies a skill. |
| when_to_use | Reach for this when planning maintenance, before running /auto-tune-skill on an unfamiliar surface, or after a quarterly review per Anthropic's "configuration written for older models becomes overhead." Do NOT use for one-off skill edits — use /ssl-audit instead for single-skill validation. |
| argument-hint | [--format=human|json] [--threshold-stale=0.5] [--threshold-aging=0.75] |
| disable-model-invocation | true |
| context | fork |
| allowed-tools | ["Read","Bash","Glob"] |
| paths | ["plugins/**/SKILL.md"] |
| logical | Markdown or JSON report listing every SKILL.md with a 0.0–1.0 staleness score, classified into stale/aging/fresh tiers, with sub-signal breakdown |
/skill-staleness-audit — Staleness scoring for SKILL.md
Composable read-only audit. Pure scoring; never edits a SKILL.md. Output feeds /auto-tune-skill as a candidate selector — pipe the JSON form through jq '.skills | map(select(.score < 0.5)) | .[].path' to get the prioritized rewrite list.
Run
bash plugins/forge-meta/skills/skill-staleness-audit/scripts/score.sh --format=human
bash plugins/forge-meta/skills/skill-staleness-audit/scripts/score.sh --format=json
Scoring signals
Each signal contributes a sub-score in [0.0, 1.0]. Total score is a weighted sum.
| Signal | Weight | Computation |
|---|
| Edit recency | 0.25 | git log -1 --format=%ct against the SKILL.md. 1.0 if ≤30 days, linear decay to 0.0 at 365 days, then 0.0. |
| Eval coverage | 0.20 | 1.0 if a sibling evals/evals.json exists, else 0.0. |
| SSL overlay | 0.15 | (present_fields)/3 for scheduling, structural, logical in frontmatter (arXiv:2604.24026). |
| Citation freshness | 0.15 | Most recent arXiv:NNNN.NNNNN in body. 1.0 if ≤18 months old, 0.5 if ≤36 months, 0.0 otherwise. Skills with no citation get 0.5 (neutral). |
| Description budget | 0.10 | description + when_to_use total chars vs 1536 cap. 1.0 if ≤1280, linear decay to 0.0 at 1536. |
| Exclusion clause | 0.10 | 1.0 if when_to_use contains Do NOT use for (per CLAUDE.md frontmatter rule), else 0.0. |
| Helper extraction | 0.05 | 1.0 if no inline ≥10-line code block in SKILL.md body (long helpers should live in scripts/). |
Tiers (defaults; override via flags):
stale — score < 0.50aging — 0.50 ≤ score < 0.75fresh — score ≥ 0.75
Output (human form)
SKILL STALENESS AUDIT — 75 skills, run at 2026-05-15T12:00:00Z
STALE (<0.50): N skills
0.34 plugins/x/skills/y/SKILL.md age:412d evals:no ssl:0/3 cite:none
...
AGING (0.50–0.75): N skills
...
FRESH (>=0.75): N skills
JSON form: {"runs_at":"…","totals":{"stale":N,"aging":N,"fresh":N},"skills":[{"path":"…","score":0.34,"tier":"stale","signals":{…}}…]}. Stable schema for piping into /auto-tune-skill.
Composes with
/auto-tune-skill — feed --format=json | jq to surface stale candidates./ssl-audit — single-skill SSL frontmatter validation (this skill aggregates across the marketplace).
Known Failure Modes
- Stale
git mtime. A freshly-cloned worktree resets file mtimes; the script reads commit time, not stat mtime, so this is not a problem in CI but can mislead on a cp -a mirror. Document the source repo if running outside the original clone.
- No citation present. A skill with no
arXiv: reference scores 0.5 on freshness (neutral). Real skills without academic backing aren't penalized; skills with intentionally-stale citations are flagged.
