Fix scope ambiguity in ponytail-audit & ponytail-review Boundaries#163
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DietrichGebert merged 1 commit intoJun 18, 2026
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The Boundaries line opened with "Complexity only, correctness bugs, security holes, and performance go to a normal review pass." The comma after "Complexity only" fuses the in-scope item with the out-of-scope list, so a model parsing it literally can read all four categories as targets of the audit — the opposite of intent. Restate the boundary as an explicit scope fence: name what is in scope, then mark correctness/security/performance as explicitly out of scope. "Out of scope" is phrasing models reliably honor as a constraint. Also aligns the scope term with each skill's stated purpose (over-engineering). Applied to both skills/ and the .openclaw/ mirror so the two trees stay in sync. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Jun 19, 2026
…179) #163 clarified the audit/review Boundaries scope but reintroduced em dashes, which this repo deliberately purged (commit 88431de "replace em dashes with plain punctuation across prose"). Keeps the clearer wording, swaps the em dash for a period. .openclaw mirrors regenerated; suite green. Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Problem
Both
ponytail-auditandponytail-reviewopen their Boundaries section with:The comma after "Complexity only" fuses the in-scope item with the out-of-scope list. Read literally — which is how a model parses an instruction — it says complexity and correctness bugs and security holes and performance all "go to a normal review pass," i.e. all four are treated as targets of the audit. That's the opposite of the intended scope, where the skill should focus only on over-engineering/complexity and push everything else to a normal review.
(
ponytail-reviewalready hints at the intent with a trailing "not this one", which is exactly the disambiguation this change makes explicit and complete.)Fix
Restate the boundary as an explicit scope fence:
descriptionfrontmatter.Scope of the change
Applied to both skill trees so they don't drift:
skills/ponytail-audit/SKILL.mdskills/ponytail-review/SKILL.md.openclaw/skills/ponytail-audit/SKILL.md.openclaw/skills/ponytail-review/SKILL.mdBoundaries bodies are byte-identical across the two trees; only the wording shown above changed. No frontmatter or behavior-table changes.
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