vale-ai-tells: Skill for Claude Code

Reword a settled draft until its prose lint passes

Run two forked skills against each other until the document holds up. Findings, retries, and rejected wordings stay in their context rather than this one. That's the whole reason the skill exists. A twenty-line commit message can cost four rounds of vale output, none of it worth the context it occupies here.

Use it once the document says what it should say. The writer changes wording rather than claims, so a draft still arguing with itself needs its author instead.

Preflight

!bash ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/scripts/preflight.sh $ARGUMENTS

Read the verdict before anything else. BLOCKED there means no agent can help. The file is missing, no rule set covers the path, or the document is already clean. Say which and hand back.

The preflight prints counts and verdicts rather than findings, on purpose. This body loads into your context rather than a fork, so a finding printed here enters the context the skill exists to keep clear.

Arguments

$ARGUMENTS carries the file first, then the command that judges it.

COMMIT_AGENTMSG mise run lint-commit-msg
PR_AGENTDESC.md mise run lint-pr-description
docs/design.md mise run lint-draft docs/design.md

The command comes from the caller because nobody else knows which gate applies. A commit draft answers to the commit-msg scope, and a description to its own task. Anything else takes mise run lint-draft, which runs vale and cspell and rumdl together over one file.

Prefer a task that runs every checker at once. mise run lint-prose runs vale alone, so a document clearing it can still fail spelling and structure, and a verdict from that task is narrower than it sounds.

Where the arguments don't name a file, ask which one. That first word is the path the guard protects. A run starting without it leaves the draft unprotected.

Step 1: fix

Invoke write-prose-fix. It runs forked, and its own context block hands it the findings and the document, so it starts working rather than looking.