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agent-skills-toolkit

askit-build-chain-contract

askit-build-chain-contract (reference)

Section titled “askit-build-chain-contract (reference)”

Authors a plugin’s chain contract (agents/_chain-permitted.yaml, Standard sec 3.6, Convergent tier): the explicit declaration of which components may invoke which others.

Modes

Section titled “Modes”
  • create: scan metadata.chain declarations, author agents/_chain-permitted.yaml (one entry per caller), optionally agents/_pairing.yaml, evaluate to a clean S4.
  • improve: resolve S4 orphans (add the permission) and phantoms (fix/remove the entry, or create the missing component).

Rules (sec 3.6)

Section titled “Rules (sec 3.6)”
  • Conditional MUST: required if and only if a component invokes another; no empty contract for a plugin that does not chain.
  • Every metadata.chain invocation MUST be permitted (no orphan); every entry MUST name an on-disk component (no phantom). A legacy top-level chain: location predates Standard vocabulary alignment and is still read for compatibility.
  • metadata.chain SHOULD be written as a comma-separated string (chain: askit-skill-author, askit-reviewer), the recommended shape: the agentskills.io spec defines metadata as a map of string keys to string values, and the reference implementation skills-ref coerces every metadata value through Python’s str() - a YAML list under metadata.chain is silently rewritten to a string containing a Python list repr (e.g. "['a', 'b']"), which no consumer can use. S4 also still reads metadata.chain written as a YAML list, and the legacy top-level chain: key in either shape, so existing plugins on those shapes do not regress.
  • Scheduled tightening (ADR 0041, “warn-first for the string shape”). A STRING-shaped declaration is newly parsed by this reader (v1.10.1); a finding reachable ONLY through that shape (an orphan, or “chaining used but no contract”) is warn at Standard 0.12, not error, so upgrading the toolkit alone cannot newly gate-fail a plugin. The identical finding from an ARRAY-shaped declaration, or from an existing contract file or _workflows/, stays error, unchanged. The warn graduates to error at Standard 0.13.
  • The contract is agent-agnostic (one file, no per-target form).

Validation

Section titled “Validation”

S4 (chain-contract check) flags orphans and phantoms. See the build-a-chain-contract how-to and authoring-chain-contracts.