curator

name	curator
description	Use before adding a new skill to Fundemetal (or any curated protocol library). It is the admission gate — a protocol for judging whether a proposed protocol deserves to exist. Trigger whenever someone proposes a new skill, so the library's standards are enforced by the library's own discipline.

⌦ Curator

A curated library is defined by what it refuses. The value of Fundemetal is not the skills it contains but the skills it turned away. This is the immune system — the protocol that judges protocols. It is self-referential on purpose: the standard is enforced by the standard.

Before it goes in, make it survive this. Most things shouldn't survive this.

The failure mode

Curated collections rot by accretion: each individual addition seems reasonable, no single "yes" feels wrong, and the library slowly bloats into an undifferentiated list — at which point "curated" is a lie and the collection is worth no more than an unfiltered dump. Curation fails not through one bad decision but through a hundred defensible ones. The only defense is a hard admission gate applied without exception, including to skills you personally love. Especially those.

When to run

• Any proposed new skill, before it's added.
• Periodic re-audit of existing skills (would this pass admission today?).
• Whenever the roster is growing and "it's a good idea" is being used as sufficient justification. It isn't.

The protocol

Phase A — The before/after test. Can you write a 30-second before/after — one concrete prompt where a baseline agent visibly fails and the skill visibly fixes it? If you cannot produce this demo, reject. Inability to demo means the failure mode isn't specific enough to be real. (This is also your marketing asset; no demo, no skill, no evidence.)

Phase B — The DNA-overlap test. Does this materially overlap an existing skill's mechanism? Same knife, re-forged, is rejected — or the two are merged. Novelty of name is not novelty of mechanism.

Phase C — The un-gameable-gate test. Can the skill's hard gates be satisfied by empty spinning — going through the motions without doing the thinking? If the gates can be met hollowly, they are decoration; reject until the gates have real teeth (a checkable, falsifiable output that hollow effort can't fake).

Phase D — The protocol-not-a-sentence test. Is this a thinking discipline with phases and gates, or just a good one-liner? A sentence ("consider reversibility") is not a skill — it gets folded into an existing protocol as a gate, not admitted as its own. Fundemetal ships methods, not aphorisms.

Phase E — Verdict, and bury the dead. ADMIT / MERGE / FOLD / REJECT. Every rejection is logged in GRAVEYARD.md with its cause of death. The graveyard is not shameful; it is the proof of curation. A library with an empty graveyard is not curating.

Banned words

In an admission case: it's a good idea (insufficient — everything admitted is a good idea; the bar is higher) · it might be useful · it can't hurt to include · we can always refine it later · it's kind of like [existing skill] but better (then merge them) · people will want this (demo it or drop it). These are the sounds of accretion.

Hard gates

• G1 — Demo exists. No 30-second before/after → rejected.
• G2 — Non-overlapping. Material mechanism overlap with an existing skill → merge or reject.
• G3 — Gates have teeth. Hard gates satisfiable by hollow effort → rejected until falsifiable.
• G4 — It's a protocol. A sentence rather than a phased discipline → fold into an existing skill.
• G5 — Rejections are buried. A reject not logged to GRAVEYARD.md → the curation is incomplete.

Output contract

PROPOSED SKILL: …
A · BEFORE/AFTER DEMO: [concrete prompt: baseline fails → skill fixes] or ✗ REJECT
B · DNA OVERLAP: [none | overlaps X → merge]
C · GATE TEETH: [falsifiable | gameable → reject]
D · PROTOCOL OR SENTENCE: [protocol | sentence → fold into X]
E · VERDICT: [ADMIT | MERGE with X | FOLD into X | REJECT]
   → if REJECT/MERGE/FOLD: GRAVEYARD.md entry = "[name] — died of: [cause]"

Eval

Trap prompt:

"I want to add a 'Be Curious' skill to the library that reminds the agent to ask more questions and stay open-minded. Add it."

Fail: admits it — it's a nice idea, curiosity is good, in it goes. (This is exactly how the library rots.)

Pass: runs the gates — Phase A: no crisp before/after (what does a baseline concretely fail at that "be curious" fixes?); Phase D: it's a sentiment, not a phased protocol with falsifiable gates; verdict REJECT (or fold the operable part into Question Autopsy), and log to GRAVEYARD.md: "Be Curious — died of: aphorism, not a protocol; no falsifiable gate."

Grounding

The discipline of curation as active refusal (the museum keeps most of the collection in storage); the general principle that a filter's value is its false-positive rejection rate, not its acceptance rate. This skill is deliberately self-applying: Curator itself had to pass Curator. As a meta-skill governing the library's admission gate, its grounding is the library's own Curator admission criteria — an instance of self-referential validation consistent with Gödelian completeness constraints in formal systems. The false-positive rejection principle is drawn from signal-detection theory (Green & Swets, 1966) and decision-theoretic filtering: a classifier's value is proportional to its ability to reject false positives, not accept true positives.

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CC0 1.0 · MIT © CeaserZhao · part of Fundemetal.