Conciseness

The body is dense and assumes competence — no concept explanations, just commands, contracts, and stop rules — earning above the score-3 anchor. It falls short of score 5 because stop conditions are restated across Validation, Failure Mode, and Constraints, and the 'context-disposition policy' paragraph in the Procedure reads as boilerplate padding that adds tokens without actionable value.

Actionability

The Validation block gives concrete commands (git status --short, test -f, rg, ./bin/ask ... --json --robot), and the Delegation Examples and Output Template are copy-paste ready. Not score 5 because some steps remain abstract ('Refresh dashboards/browser', 'confirm continuation authority') without commands, and the validation commands carry unresolved placeholders like <approved-plan-path>.

Workflow Clarity

The Procedure is a clearly ordered 1–7 sequence with an explicit validation step, a fail-fast rule ('stop at the first failed gate'), and an error-recovery feedback loop (route failures to he-work or he-code-review with the exact command and output). This matches the score-5 anchor: explicit validation steps, feedback loops, and defined stop conditions.

Progressive Disclosure

The SKILL.md stays an overview with detail pushed to one-level-deep bundle files (references/phase-gate-contract.md, references/contract.yaml, references/evals.yaml — all verified present). Not score 5 because the References section is a terse bare list with minimal signaling of when each file should be read, and three referenced paths (../../references/stage-arc-boundary-contract.md, subagent-call-contract.md, deferred-context-index.md) point outside the skill bundle and could not be verified to resolve.

Specificity

The description enumerates six concrete actions — "check live state, confirm continuation authority, execute only the active he-work slice, verify gates, update Linear only with approval, and stop before unsafe staging or closure" — comprehensively covering the skill's behavior. It exceeds the score-4 anchor ('lists several specific actions; minor gaps') because every phase of the loop (check, authorize, execute, verify, report, halt) is explicitly named.

Completeness

Both are answered: what ("Runs approved Harness Engineering plans in recurring phases...") and when ("Use when a plan, issue, or PR needs continued phase-by-phase execution"). Not score 5 because the 'when' clause states an abstract condition rather than concrete user trigger phrases (compare the score-5 example 'when the user mentions PDFs, forms, or document extraction').

Trigger Term Quality

Keywords like "plan, issue, or PR" and "phase-by-phase execution" are relevant, but natural user phrasings such as "continue the plan", "keep this PR moving", or "run the next phase" are absent, and terms like "Harness Engineering plans" are internal jargon. This matches the score-3 anchor (relevant keywords missing common variations/synonyms) rather than score 4, which expects broader natural-term coverage.

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

It carves out a clear niche — recurring, gated execution of an already-approved plan — that is clearly distinguishable from one-off implementation skills, and the explicit 'approved' and 'phase-by-phase' qualifiers minimize wrong-skill triggers. Fits the score-5 anchor (clear niche with distinct triggers; minimal conflict risk).