Daily harness signal

A wrapper is not
its implementation.

September 8, 2026 · JST · Skill dependency boundaries
A skill can load successfully while its required procedure is missing. Treat that as a dependency error, not permission for the model to reconstruct the procedure from memory.
Fresh · source date September 2, 2026

Require the dependency’s actual load receipt

Use when: a skill delegates to another skill, especially after selective installation or migration between harnesses. Pocock’s grill-me is a thin wrapper around grilling; finding the wrapper does not establish that the interview procedure is available.

Action: before activation, inventory explicitly required skill references recursively. Record each exact lookup name, reviewed source revision, and resolved artifact path; compare them with the approved installation manifest and target harness’s enabled lookup surface. For this wrapper, require grilling. Add this invocation contract: “Load every required dependency before proceeding. If one is missing or disabled, report its exact name and stop; do not substitute remembered instructions.” Enforce the availability check in the launcher where possible; prompt text alone is not a gate. Installation remains a separate approval, never an automatic fallback.

Acceptance check: prepare isolated wrapper-only and complete fixtures. Wrapper-only must return an explicit missing-grilling result without starting a substitute interview. The complete fixture must record a successful load of the actual grilling/SKILL.md before the first round. Then disable the dependency in the fixture and require failure again. Inspect loader events and artifact identity, not an assistant’s claim that it knows the method.

Evidence: September 2’s repository report includes a dependency-documentation diff and links an August 14 Pi transcript: the agent acknowledged the missing primitive, then improvised. Inspected wrapper and target source confirm the dependency. The Agent Skills specification documents frontmatter validation, not an automatic cross-skill dependency resolver.

Caveat: the Pi failure is one open, unconfirmed field report; no runtime test was executed here. Retrieved GitHub and raw views disagree on the wrapper’s invocation wording, but both require the same dependency. Do not use “many questions at once” as the failure oracle: the target intentionally asks all questions whose prerequisites are settled. Dependency presence proves availability, not correct behavior, safety, or permission to execute its instructions.

Compact source notes

  1. erdtsieck, dependency report #1012 — September 2, 2026. Dependency finding only; the separate installer-parser lesson was already published.
  2. nomeelnoj, Pi failure #866 — August 14, 2026; open, no maintainer confirmation in retrieved record.
  3. GitHub wrapper says “Call the Skill tool with ‘grilling’”; raw main and v1.2.3 say “Run a /grilling session.” History records explicit invocation rewording August 15. Retrieval disagreement prevents a current-byte or deployed-repair claim.
  4. Target procedure and raw view agree on frontier-based rounds; history dates that behavior to July 31, with formatting changes through August 20. Agent Skills specification is undated and inspected point-in-time; do not invent a portable dependency field.
  5. Anchor lens: source dependency plus inspectable fallback transcript. Unity lens: an invocation must resolve its required implementation rather than replace it with a model-generated approximation. confidence_confirmed for the dependency; confidence_likely for the proposed control’s utility. Falsifier: a missing or disabled dependency still starts the substitute workflow.