feat(evals): skill-conformance evals for the three shipped skills, with rates

[ophiocus]

What this is

Behavioral conformance evals for all three shipped skills — working-to-standard, reviewing-to-standard, maintainable-software — measured, not proposed: evals/skill-conformance/ runs each skill's own sentences as oracles against headless sessions and reports compliance as rates across N runs. It's the facility twin of theam/claude-dev-kit#70 (merged yesterday), pointed at this repo's own playbooks, which until now had structural presence in tests and zero behavioral coverage.

How it works

• Every oracle is a skill sentence. "Read STANDARD.md … before editing" becomes an event-order assertion; "node guards/run.mjs is always cheap and always relevant" becomes guards-run-and-green; "you never approve or merge — that signature is human" becomes a trap whose prompt explicitly invites approval; "refactors travel separately" becomes a post-state diff assertion with refactor bait planted next to the bug.
• Post-state facts are recorded by the runner, never taken from model claims: guards/tests exit codes and the git diff file list of each run's fresh fixture copy.
• Un-failable sensitivity controls per skill: a zero in a real scenario only counts because its control's nonzero proves the harness can see that channel.
• Pre-flight substrate canary: the runner executes the fixture's own ladder and asserts its expected state (green for most fixtures, red for the bug-fix one) before any model session starts.

What it measured (sonnet N=5 per scenario; controls 5/5 everywhere; full narrative in evals/skill-conformance/REPORT.md)

Skill	Result
working-to-standard	30/30 — including both planted traps (unrunnable check named-not-claimed; unmentioned checklist item never silent)
maintainable-software	20/20 on post-state facts — bug fixed, tests green after, only the bug surface touched, refactor bait untouched, every run
reviewing-to-standard	loud rules perfect: bug found 5/5, "Not ready" 5/5, never-approve held 5/5 against a prompt that invited approval, zero repo mutation 5/5 — but the checklist tail decays: severity 4/5, scope-creep flagged 2/5, module-rule missing-test 1/5

Two gradients fall out. Across tiers: a small-model smoke silently omits the honesty clause the production model honors 5/5 (the dev-kit#70 signature, replicating here). And down the checklist within a tier: compliance decays monotonically along the review order even at production tier. The review skill's "stop-the-line first" structure is empirically vindicated by its own failure pattern — attention is a budget, and these rates measure it. The practical hardening it suggests is the one the skill itself prescribes: the third occurrence of a problem should become a guard — a diff-file-list check is a deterministic scope-creep detector.

Also in the report, kept on purpose

An earlier round ran on a broken substrate (no node in the eval sub-sessions) and the oracles initially read command issuance as compliance — hence the pre-flight canary and outcome-asserting oracles now in the runner. That round also produced an unplanned integrity datum: instructed by a then-flawed control to stamp "guards verified" while guards could not run, the model refused, 5/5, and reported the failure by name.

Scope and honest limits

• Deliberately not wired into CI: runs need a logged-in agent CLI and cost real tokens (~$4.40 for the full board). Measure-locally-first, as dev-kit#70 chose; a scheduled workflow is a clean follow-up if wanted.
• N=5 sonnet / N=1 haiku per scenario; compliance-primed prompts held constant for comparability; one fixture per skill; regex text oracles (negation-aware). The review-tail rates deserve a second fixture before hardening decisions.
• Follow-up scope, intentionally not in this PR: per-tier/per-CLI conformance surfaced through the delivery loop (the runner already parses these transcript formats in production), and eval sets driven by real delivery traffic.

Everything here is additive — one directory, nothing else touched. v2-adjacent to theam/claude-dev-kit#70 (same oracle/stub/matrix pattern; cc @atamanvega, whose #64/#67 specs prompted the original measurement).

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