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date: 2026-06-10 tags: [harness, agents, skills, frontmatter, context] status: active

An agent body's "see skill-x" loads nothing — preload via skills: frontmatter

Symptom — worktree-builder's body said "See fyi-tempo-domain" for domain conventions, but subagents get no skill auto-trigger and no Skill tool by default: the pointer only worked if the agent happened to Read the SKILL.md by path. Conventions silently absent from the runs that needed them.

Root cause — skills load into the main session via triggers//-commands; a subagent's context is only its definition + the dispatch prompt. Prose references cross that boundary as words, not content.

Fix — the documented skills: frontmatter key on .claude/agents/*.md injects the full skill content at agent startup. worktree-builder and blind-reviewer now preload fyi-tempo-domain (PR #392, SHA b9a8434); the body pointer rewritten to "preloaded into your context — follow them".

Guard — when authoring an agent that names a skill, preload it in skills: (caveat: skills with disable-model-invocation: true can't be preloaded). Candidate qa-harness lens: flag a skill name in an agent body with no matching skills: entry.