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Thread decomposition and PR-size discipline through the handbook - #124

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peter/work-decomposition-references
Aug 17, 2026
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Thread decomposition and PR-size discipline through the handbook#124
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peter/work-decomposition-references

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Description

Follow-up to the previous commit, which added workflows/work-decomposition.md, the skill's Decompose phase, and gate 10. This wires the existing pages into them. No new rules — every change here points at content that already landed.

  • pr-authoring: "one issue, one PR" added to the small-focused-self-contained list, plus a "when a PR has to be bigger" section (stop before opening it, propose the split, record the approval in the description, agents never self-approve). States why the standard is reviewability rather than a line count, and narrows the rename/generated-code exemption to scope-width only. Two anti-patterns added.

  • code-review: size is now the first thing a reviewer checks, with guidance for handling an oversized PR in both reviewer modes. "Collapsed decomposition" added as a re-plan trigger — the most common way an agent produces an unreviewable diff while staying technically in scope.

  • repo-and-ci-setup: epic label, a work-tracking subsection covering milestones, and a note that Linear/Jira map the same three levels.

  • agent-era-invariants 1: notes that scope discipline alone does not guarantee reviewability, and points at decomposition and gate 10.

  • The pr-author and code-review skills mirror their source pages, per the existing source: metadata contract.

llms.txt, README, and AGENTS indexes updated to match. The invariants entry read "Eight" while nine existed; corrected alongside.

@kalambet kalambet self-assigned this Aug 12, 2026
Base automatically changed from peter/work-decomposition to main August 14, 2026 13:37
Follow-up to the previous commit, which added workflows/work-decomposition.md,
the skill's Decompose phase, and gate 10. This wires the existing pages into
them. No new rules — every change here points at content that already landed.

- pr-authoring: "one issue, one PR" added to the small-focused-self-contained
  list, plus a "when a PR has to be bigger" section (stop before opening it,
  propose the split, record the approval in the description, agents never
  self-approve). States why the standard is reviewability rather than a line
  count, and narrows the rename/generated-code exemption to scope-width only.
  Two anti-patterns added.

- code-review: size is now the first thing a reviewer checks, with guidance
  for handling an oversized PR in both reviewer modes. "Collapsed
  decomposition" added as a re-plan trigger — the most common way an agent
  produces an unreviewable diff while staying technically in scope.

- repo-and-ci-setup: `epic` label, a work-tracking subsection covering
  milestones, and a note that Linear/Jira map the same three levels.

- agent-era-invariants 1: notes that scope discipline alone does not
  guarantee reviewability, and points at decomposition and gate 10.

- The pr-author and code-review skills mirror their source pages, per the
  existing source: metadata contract.

llms.txt, README, and AGENTS indexes updated to match. The invariants entry
read "Eight" while nine existed; corrected alongside.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@kalambet
kalambet force-pushed the peter/work-decomposition-references branch from 084a100 to 7431919 Compare August 14, 2026 13:38
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cloudflare-workers-and-pages Bot commented Aug 14, 2026

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Deploying engineering-handbook with  Cloudflare Pages  Cloudflare Pages

Latest commit: 12ccf4e
Status: ✅  Deploy successful!
Preview URL: https://bd4a2394.engineering-handbook-8f2.pages.dev
Branch Preview URL: https://peter-work-decomposition-ref.engineering-handbook-8f2.pages.dev

View logs

…n CI

A SKILL.md `description` over 1024 characters makes the skill fail to load
— it goes silently missing rather than loudly broken. Adding the work-
decomposition triggers pushed chainsafe-research-plan-implement from 1006
to 1211 characters, which disables the skill this PR was extending.

Descriptions trimmed to fit (all trigger coverage retained; the budget came
from compressed prose and redundant near-synonym triggers):

  chainsafe-research-plan-implement  1211 -> 964
  chainsafe-zig-architect            1130 -> 1000
  chainsafe-zig-developer            1128 ->  977
  chainsafe-zig-reviewer             1059 -> 1003

The three zig skills were already over the limit on main; they are fixed
here because the new gate would otherwise fail on main immediately.

Enforcement:

- scripts/check-skill-descriptions.sh — counts characters, not bytes (the
  descriptions are full of em-dashes; a byte count over-reports by ~40%).
  Follows check-skills-sync.sh conventions.
- Wired into .github/workflows/skills-sync.yml.
- AGENTS.md and workflows/skill-description-tuning.md state the limit as an
  authoring constraint. The tuning loop optimizes for triggering accuracy
  and has no notion of length, so it will return an over-limit
  best_description; appending triggers by hand to an already-long field is
  the other way to blow the limit.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ABTxxnA5MPevGBWVTQhi2i
@kalambet
kalambet merged commit 77cbe89 into main Aug 17, 2026
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@kalambet
kalambet deleted the peter/work-decomposition-references branch August 17, 2026 04:38
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2 participants