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Wrapping the kb skills in a federation layer

Draft - this is an exploration

Unfinished. It is here because the gap is worth showing, not because it is ready to be read as settled.

Something I committed to, built on, and withdrew from. It is a record of what the work taught, not a description of how anything is done now.

A stub. The work happened and was retired; this page is the account of it, and is not written yet. What it needs to cover:

  • What I wanted. A federation layer over the kb-* skills that reimplemented nothing: the upstream skills vendored unmodified as the single-bundle mechanic, a thin layer above them owning only the manifest-aware concerns. The architecture is Federated OKF knowledge bases, whose skill-layer section this design originally filled.
  • What I built. Roughly twenty commits and fifty-six passing tests, so this was not abandoned at the sketch stage. Worth saying what actually worked.
  • Why I stopped. A federated skill invoked its single-bundle counterpart and then executed the prose that came back, which is control flow through prompt obedience rather than through a call. The SKILL.md accumulated three shouted warnings against an indirection the design had introduced itself, which is the tell worth recording: a document arguing with its own architecture.
  • The second reason, which is structural. Skills have no dependency resolution. npx skills add copies a directory and verifies nothing, so a layer that requires another skill cannot state that requirement anywhere a machine will check. The kb-* skills were not installed on the machine whilst the global AGENTS.md advertised the layer above them.
  • What I kept. The manifest, the referenceable_by rule, fail-closed defaults, the commit-time leak guard, and the rule that replaced the delegation: a skill may run a command; a skill never invokes another skill. Also the upstream bundle itself, which is now a read-only source here rather than a dependency.

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