Gate agent-skills length on tokens rather than lines - #448
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📝 WalkthroughWalkthroughThe recommended configuration now enforces a 5,000-token limit for ChangesToken-based length limits
Estimated code review effort: 3 (Moderate) | ~20 minutes Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to The change moves the default size warning from line counts to tokens while retaining the optional line-count rule. It is merge-ready after normal review, with only a small documentation correction and a trivial test cleanup remaining. 🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5✅ Passed checks (5 passed)
Full details: Docstring CoverageExplanation No functions found in the changed files to evaluate docstring coverage. Skipping docstring coverage check. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 0 functions across 6 files. (2 skipped: 2 unsupported.) Thanks for using CodeRabbit! It's free for OSS, and your support helps us grow. If you like it, consider giving us a shout-out. Comment |
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The recommended config capped references/ at 300 lines, which read as a hard limit but has no upstream basis. The spec's third progressive- disclosure tier is "Resources (as needed)" and its references/ guidance is qualitative; Anthropic's skill-creator calls bundled resources "unlimited, loaded as needed". The only numeric threshold anywhere near 300 is a table-of-contents trigger, not a cap. It also bounded the wrong quantity. What a reference file costs is the context it occupies once loaded, and a line count tracks that poorly -- semantic line breaks and dense lists both move it without changing what the agent reads. Swap in max-tokens at 5000, the same figure the spec recommends for an instructions tier, so the rule flags a reference file that costs more to load than the SKILL.md it was split out of.
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Length is now gated on max-tokens alone. Both rules proxy for how much context a skill costs to load, and tokens measure that directly while lines only correlate. At the ~10-14 tokens per line typical of prose skills, a 500-line cap does not bind until well past 5000 tokens, so max-lines is dominated -- it cannot fire before max-tokens does. Where the correlation breaks, it breaks against the line cap. Semantic line breaks, one-item-per-line lists, and reflowed tables all raise the line count without changing what the agent loads, so the rule reports formatting rather than cost. Keep the rule exported and documented: the spec does state a line figure, so a repo wanting it enforced literally can still wire it. It loses its coverage from the recommended config, so give it a direct unit test.
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gtbuchanan
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September 1, 2026 19:14
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Inline comments:
In `@packages/eslint-config/e2e/skill.test.ts`:
- Line 167: In the test setup around fixture.run(), assign
faker.lorem.sentence() to a local const named description before invoking
fixture.run(), then interpolate that description variable in the frontmatter
entry instead of generating it inline.
In `@packages/eslint-plugin-agent-skills/README.md`:
- Around line 253-255: Qualify the max-lines ordering explanation: in
packages/eslint-plugin-agent-skills/README.md lines 253-255, remove the
unconditional claim that max-lines cannot fire first and acknowledge that
explicit configurations may trigger it independently; update
.changeset/agent-skills-token-based-length.md lines 20-22 to use the same
corrected explanation.
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📒 Files selected for processing (8)
.changeset/agent-skills-token-based-length.mdpackages/eslint-config/e2e/skill.test.tspackages/eslint-config/src/plugins/agent-skills.tspackages/eslint-plugin-agent-skills/README.mdpackages/eslint-plugin-agent-skills/src/index.tspackages/eslint-plugin-agent-skills/src/rules/max-tokens.tspackages/eslint-plugin-agent-skills/test/max-lines.test.tspackages/eslint-plugin-agent-skills/test/recommended.test.ts
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📓 Path-based instructions (2)
Every PR requires a changeset — CI enforces this. Create a `.changeset/.md`
📄 CodeRabbit inference engine (AGENTS.md)
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.changeset/agent-skills-token-based-length.md
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🧠 Learnings (2)
📚 Learning: 2026-06-04T02:26:02.824Z
Learnt from: gtbuchanan
Repo: gtbuchanan/tooling PR: 139
File: packages/cli/test/coverage-codecov-upload.test.ts:2-2
Timestamp: 2026-06-04T02:26:02.824Z
Learning: In tests within **/{test,e2e,__tests__}/**/*.{test,spec}.{ts,tsx,js,jsx}, follow the AGENTS.md faker convention: direct `faker-js/faker` usage is allowed only for one-off primitives when the produced value’s shape is exactly what faker returns (e.g., `faker.git.commitSha()`, `faker.string.uuid()`). Use `gtbuchanan/test-utils/builders` only when there is a domain-shaped value worth centralizing (e.g., scoped package names, semver ranges, GitHub URLs). Do not wrap a native faker generator in a builder for a plain primitive (e.g., a raw commit SHA), since that adds indirection without centralizing any domain shape.
Applied to files:
packages/eslint-config/e2e/skill.test.ts
📚 Learning: 2026-06-17T04:54:26.509Z
Learnt from: gtbuchanan
Repo: gtbuchanan/tooling PR: 183
File: .changeset/mise-release-age-excludes.md:4-4
Timestamp: 2026-06-17T04:54:26.509Z
Learning: In the gtbuchanan/tooling repo, `.changeset/*.md` files should intentionally omit the Markdown H1 heading (MD041). Follow the changesets CLI convention: `frontmatter` followed by a blank line and then a plain summary text line. Do not prepend the summary with `# `, because the changesets CLI consumes that summary verbatim as the CHANGELOG entry; adding `# ` would introduce an unwanted stray H1 into the generated changelog. MD041 is not enforced by the repo’s `eslint-markdownlint` config for these files; any MD041 warnings for `.changeset/*.md` come from markdownlint-cli2 defaults rather than the repo’s own lint configuration.
Applied to files:
.changeset/agent-skills-token-based-length.md
🪛 markdownlint-cli2 (0.23.2)
.changeset/agent-skills-token-based-length.md
[warning] 5-5: First line in a file should be a top-level heading
(MD041, first-line-heading, first-line-h1)
The docs said max-lines "cannot fire first", which overstates it. At exactly 10 tokens per line 500 lines is 5000 tokens, and the measured floor across real skills was 10.45, so the line cap trails by 4% there rather than by a wide margin. The claim was also unconditional where the mechanism is not: below ~10 tokens per line the line cap does lead. That case is the whole reason for the change, so asserting it away argued against the point.
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Summary
configs.recommendedgates skill length onagent-skills/max-tokensalone.agent-skills/max-linesis dropped from the preset but still ships, so a repo wanting the spec's 500-line figure can wire it explicitly.One finding per commit:
SKILL.md(500 lines) was dominated. Both rules proxy for how much context a skill costs to load; tokens measure it directly. Across the skills ingtbuchanan/skills, prose density is a tight 10.5–14 tokens/line, so 500 lines doesn't bind until 5,200–7,000 tokens — it cannot fire before the 5,000-token cap. Where a line count does move independently (semantic line breaks, one-item-per-line lists, reflowed tables) it moves without changing what the agent loads.references/(300 lines) had no upstream basis. Nothing caps a reference file: the spec's third tier is "Resources (as needed)" andskill-creatorcalls bundled resources "unlimited, loaded as needed". The only nearby number is a table-of-contents trigger (">300 lines"), not a cap. Replaced bymax-tokens: 5000— a backstop for a reference file costing more to load than the instructions tier it was split out of.Testing
max-lineslost all coverage when it leftrecommended, so it gets a directRuleTestersuite. Those passed on first run since the rule already worked, so I verified they aren't tautological by mutatinglines.length <= maxto<= max + 1: 4 of 5 failed. The two behavior changes were written red-first.The e2e suite asserted the 500-line cap; that's replaced by tests for
max-tokensfiring past 5,000 tokens (no prior e2e coverage) and a 600-line cheap-token file linting clean.Checked against the real corpus: every
SKILL.mdingtbuchanan/skillspasses (largest ~4,950 of 5,000), as do both reference files (2,879 and 566 tokens).Notes for reviewers
The reasoning is the reviewable part — the diff is mostly comments, docs, and tests. Two judgment calls worth pushing back on:
major. Consumers relying onrecommendedfor a line cap silently stop seeing those reports, which reads as a behavior removal rather than a patch.references/is a derivation, not a citation. No source gives a number; it's "one reference file shouldn't cost more than a wholeSKILL.mdbody". No cap at all, matching the spec literally, is defensible.max-tokensis byte-based, so this also unblocks semantic line breaks in skill markdown — clause-level SemBR pushes the two largest skills to 596 and 527 lines while moving their token counts by single digits.