[potiuk]

Summary

• optimize-skill learns what splitting isolated-setup-install taught: a moved heading takes its references with it — eval step-config.json, anchor links, and its own heading level.
• isolated-setup-verify split: 8,428 → 4,966 tokens, under the 5,000 budget from feat(utilities): give optimize-skill budgets and an eval gate, and run it from write-skill #1332.

The two belong together: the first documents the failure mode, the second is it happening again and being caught by the step that now exists.

Type of change

• Skill change — optimize-skill Step 3 and hard rules; isolated-setup-verify split into a sibling
• CI / dev loop — one eval step-config.json gains also_include
• Documentation — regenerated counts

What the install split taught

Splitting isolated-setup-install (#1333) broke two of its four eval suites and nothing caught it until the suites ran. A suite builds its prompt live from skill_md plus step_heading; a heading that moves to a sibling leaves it extracting from a file that no longer contains it. The validator was green. prek was green.

Step 3 now says to follow every reference before calling a restructure pass done:

• Eval step-config.json — with the grep that finds them.
• Anchor links anywhere in the tree — lychee catches these, which is why it runs whole-tree rather than over the diff.
• The heading level itself. A block cut from mid-body starts at ###, cannot open a new file, and shifts a level — changing both the anchor and the string an eval matches on. That makes it the one byte a split may change, and the hard rule now says so rather than leaving "identical bytes" to be read literally and then quietly violated.

Of the three, lychee catches one, the validator catches none, and only running the suite catches the eval configs. That is the concrete argument for the eval gate.

The verify split, and why it is not the obvious one

The twelve checks are the run. Moving them wholesale would have bought a read and saved nothing — the trap the pre-flight block taught. So only the conditional checks moved:

moved	condition
Check 9 — vetted-ops split	only when the adopter routes through the dispatcher
Check 10 — hardware key, signing key	only when commits are signed or ssh goes through gpg-agent
Check 12 — container gateway	only when podman or docker is on PATH
Check 13 — eval-harness exclusion	only when step M was taken
Check 8 — whole-user scope detection	only when core.hooksPath is set

3,916 tokens in conditional-checks.md. Each leaves its condition and the n/a answer in the body, so a run without vetted-ops, without a signing key, without podman, in per-project scope, reads none of it.

Checks 5 and 8 were then tightened in place to land under budget: the below-floor branching says the same three things in fewer words, and the hard-fail rule is untouched — still explicitly saying not to downgrade it to a ⚠.

Eval evidence

	result
baseline, unmodified main	11/14, 3 failures
after the split	9/14
after also_include	12/14

step-1-classify/case-7 was genuinely mine: it grades sub-check 10a against a body that now held only a stub. That suite builds its prompt from ## The 12 checks, so it needs the sibling too — also_include supplies it, the same mechanism added for the pre-flight in #1324.

The two survivors are both step-2-recommend, whose section (## After the report) is byte-identical to main and which failed on the baseline run as well, on the same follow_up ordering assertion. Reported rather than adjudicated, which is what the skill now says to do with a suite that cannot hold still.

Test plan

• prek run --all-files clean.
• skill-and-tool-validate passes.
• Graded evals for setup-isolated-setup-verify: 12/14, against an 11/14 baseline measured on unmodified main.

Notes for reviewers

Still over budget, not here: setup 8,853 (already has 12 siblings), isolated-setup-doctor 7,859 and isolated-setup-update 5,512, both with no siblings.

No prose pass on the setup family yet. Checks 5 and 8 were tightened only because the body sat 47 tokens over after the structural move; that is the whole of the rewording here.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code