Check reference / Clarity & Instructions

CLARITY-05 Constraints & failure modes stated

Clarity & Instructions · 18% of the grade · LLM-assisted · applies to skills · subagents · slash commands

LLM-assisted — runs with an Anthropic key (BYOK on the CLI, managed on Pro hosted scans).

Why it matters

A skill that only describes the happy path misbehaves the first time reality deviates — a missing input, an ambiguous request, a failing command. With no stated recovery plan, the model improvises, and improvisation is where skills go wrong.

How to fix it

State the preconditions, limits, and edge cases up front, and say what to do when each goes wrong: "if X is missing, ask; if Y fails, do Z instead." An LLM judges the coverage (pass at 80/100) — concrete failure-mode handling scores highest, happy-path-only prose fails.

Example

✗ flagged
Run the migration script and report success.
✓ passes
Run the migration script. If it fails on a lock timeout, retry once. If the schema is already current, stop and say so — never re-run a completed migration.