| name | cartridge-forge |
| description | Use when the user asks to forge, scaffold, or author a new cartridge — content cartridge, department cartridge, or chipset bundle. Drives the cartridge-forge loop (scaffold → fill → gate checks → commit) via the skill-creator cartridge CLI. |
| description-frequency | on-demand |
| user-invocable | true |
| type | skill |
| category | gsd |
| status | stable |
| origin | tibsfox |
| modified | false |
| first_seen | "2026-04-15T00:00:00.000Z" |
| first_path | examples/skills/gsd/cartridge-forge/SKILL.md |
| superseded_by | null |
Cartridge Forge
Forge a new cartridge end-to-end using the skill-creator cartridge
CLI. The forge is the toolchain that builds cartridges; this skill
is the playbook that drives it.
When to invoke
Trigger on any of:
- "create a cartridge for X"
- "forge a new cartridge"
- "scaffold a department" / "generate a department cartridge"
- "build a content cartridge"
- "make a chipset bundle for X"
Do not trigger for migrating legacy cartridges (that is
cartridge migrate) or for forking an existing one (that is
cartridge fork).
Prerequisites
docs/cartridge/FORGING-GUIDE.md and
docs/cartridge/CARTRIDGE-SPEC.md are the normative references.
Read them once per session if the context is not already loaded.- Pick the target directory. Convention:
examples/cartridges/<slug>/ for in-repo cartridges./my-cartridges/<slug>/ for ad-hoc / user-local work
- Pick the slug. Drop the
-department suffix unless the
cartridge is directly tied to a college department in
.college/. "systems-administration" — not
"systems-administration-department".
- Pick the template:
department (skills + agents + teams),
content (deepMap + story arc), coprocessor (pure functional
tooling), or graphics (GLSL / OpenGL / WebGL / Vulkan shader
pipeline; grounded in the GFX research series at
/Research/GFX/ on tibsfox.com).
The Forge Loop
scaffold → fill → validate → eval → dedup → metrics → commit
Every step is idempotent and JSON-capable. eval is the gate —
if it exits non-zero, the cartridge is not ready to ship.
1. Scaffold
skill-creator cartridge scaffold <template> <dir> <slug>
Writes an 8-file skeleton: cartridge.yaml, chipsets/*.yaml,
one placeholder skill, agent, and team, plus a README.md.
Round-trips through load → validate with zero errors before
any edits.
2. Fill
Replace placeholder content with real content. A full department
cartridge typically wants:
