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docs(writing-skills): step numbering rule for skills - #780

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docs/writing-skills-step-numbering
Sep 17, 2026
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WilcoLouwerse merged 1 commit into
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docs/writing-skills-step-numbering

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@WilcoLouwerse WilcoLouwerse commented Sep 17, 2026 •

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What

Adds a Step Numbering section to docs/claude/writing-skills.md (under SKILL.md Format) and one matching line to docs/claude/skill-checklist.md.

The rule:

  1. Steps are whole numbers from 1 upward, ascending by one, no gaps. There is no Step 0.
  2. Document order is execution order. Never "runs after Step 4, despite the number" — renumber instead.
  3. At most one trailing letter (Step 7a), only where a step is genuinely a sub-step of the one before it. Letters run a, b, c without gaps.
  4. Nothing after the letter, nothing else appended. No Step 5c.5, no Step 6.5, no Step 4a.2.
  5. Same rules for the internal steps of a references/*.md sub-procedure and for ordered lists inside a step.

Plus: inserting a step means renumbering — map every old number to its new one first, then apply the whole map in one substitution across SKILL.md, references/, scripts/, evals/ and the learnings files, so no pointer goes stale and no number gets re-mapped twice.

Why

Step numbers are a skill's addressing scheme: every see Step N, every learnings-index pointer, every eval note and every reference-doc title resolves through them. Once the sequence stops being sortable, a reader can no longer tell what has already run at any point.

Observed

hydra's review-pr had drifted to Step 0, Step 0.5 after Step 1, Step 1a/2a after Step 2, Step 5c.5, Step 6.5b and a Step 8b with no 8a. Renumbered to Step 1–27 in ConductionNL/hydra (companion PR: https://github.com/ConductionNL/hydra/pull/681).

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

Adds a "Step Numbering" section under SKILL.md Format: steps are whole
numbers from 1 upward, document order is execution order, at most one
trailing letter (a, b, c without gaps) and never anything after it —
no Step 0, no Step 5c.5, no Step 6.5b. The same rules apply to the
internal steps of a references/*.md sub-procedure and to ordered lists
inside a step. Inserting a step means renumbering, in one substitution
across SKILL.md, references, scripts, evals and learnings so no pointer
goes stale.

Prompted by hydra's review-pr skill, which had drifted to 27 steps
whose numbers no longer sorted into execution order. One matching
line added to skill-checklist.md.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <[email protected]>
@WilcoLouwerse
WilcoLouwerse merged commit a634242 into main Sep 17, 2026
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@WilcoLouwerse
WilcoLouwerse deleted the docs/writing-skills-step-numbering branch September 17, 2026 12:06
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