knowledge-mcp: Skill for Claude Code

AUTHOR-CRITERIA — writing a criterion that can carry weight

WHAT CRITERIA ARE

Criteria are GUARDRAILS on how new additions or changes will work with and affect the ecosystem, and on how the changes solve the goal. Every criterion belongs to exactly one of THREE CATEGORIES, declared on the criterion:

1. PERFORMANCE — the change meets its cost shape under real scale: the batch stays batched, the hot path stays allocation-flat, the query rides its index, the measured band holds at the scales the work will meet.
2. LOGIC FAILURES — the finished work behaves as intended and the wrong-but-compiling implementation is rejected: given this input, that output; this invariant holds under that operation; the forbidden state cannot be reached; the semantics match the goal.
3. BLAST RADIUS — the change's effect on existing OUT-OF-SCOPE code that depends on what changed: dependents still behave correctly (exercise their paths, run their suites against the change), contracts consumers rely on still hold, and nothing the change retired is still load-bearing somewhere the scope fence didn't look.

A candidate criterion that fits none of the three is not a criterion. A plan whose set leaves any category unexamined states why (a doc-only change has no performance category; a leaf addition may have no blast radius — say so, with the reasoning, rather than padding).

NEVER GREP-SATISFIABLE: a criterion satisfiable by a grep — by any inspection of text — is definitionally not testing any of the three categories, because text inspection observes what the code SAYS, never what it DOES. A criterion's command EXECUTES the behavior it guards: runs the system, the suite, the probe, the measurement. Text tools may appear inside a command only to post-process executed output (asserting on a runner's PASS line, extracting a measured number) — never as the thing that decides. RECONCILIATION with the prose-deliverable rule (invariant sentences): a mandated prose artifact whose subject no execution can observe (a shipped doc row, a locked comment phrase) may carry a text leg that can REJECT — but GREEN always requires the criterion's executing legs to pass. Reject-only text legs do not make a criterion grep-satisfiable; a criterion whose green is reachable by text inspection alone does. A text leg guarding a prose CLASS (not one pinned string) owes a bad fixture per axis it claims to discriminate — case, word order, interposed tokens — or the pattern is re-derived from the step's own enumerated sites and checked against every one before storing. A known-positive control proves the probe ran; it never proves the pattern's shape matches the class.