Conciseness

The body is a lean routing document with zero concept explanations or OTel primers; it assumes Claude's competence and every section is navigation or fetch guidance. Version-sensitive facts are templated with placeholders and live-fetch commands instead of hardcoded version numbers, so nothing goes stale. Matches the anchor-5 "every token earns its place" example.

Actionability

Exact copy-paste commands ("gh api repos/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java/releases/latest -q '.tag_name'") and concrete WebFetch URLs cover the common cases, but the "<selected-sdk-tag>"/"<selected-agent-tag>" placeholders are never explicitly tied to the latest-release commands that populate them — the reader must infer which release stream feeds which placeholder. Not 5 because of that minor executable gap.

Workflow Clarity

Reference routing is an unambiguous decision table ("Use when" column), and the Explorer lookup is a numbered 2-step sequence with exact URLs. However, resolving the tag placeholders before the WebFetch steps is an implicit step rather than an explicitly ordered one. No validation cap applies since nothing is destructive or batch; not 5 because the tag-resolution ordering is left implicit.

Progressive Disclosure

Two real, one-level-deep, self-contained reference files are clearly signaled via a purpose table with per-file "Use when" conditions, and both referenced paths exist in the bundle. Not 5 because the Sources of Truth table is duplicated verbatim in references/declarative-setup.md — content appearing in both the overview and a reference file is a minor organization gap rather than an appropriately split structure.

Specificity

Lists multiple concrete capabilities — "Javaagent zero-code instrumentation, Spring Boot Starter, manual autoconfigure SDK, declarative YAML configuration, BOM dependency management, sensitive-data capture and redaction (url.query, headers, request parameters, SQL sanitization)" — down to specific attribute and config names, comprehensively covering the skill's scope. Not 4: coverage is broad and every item names a concrete mechanism rather than leaving minor gaps.

Completeness

Clearly answers both "what" (the capability list) and "when": "Use when adding, reviewing, or configuring OpenTelemetry in a Java service. Triggers on ..." with concrete trigger phrases. Matches the anchor-5 example structure exactly; not 4 because the "when" clause is fully explicit, not merely present.

Trigger Term Quality

Explicit triggers include natural user phrases ("setup otel in java", "java telemetry", "javaagent", "Spring Boot otel") plus API names a developer would paste ("GlobalOpenTelemetry", "AutoConfiguredOpenTelemetrySdk", "TracerProvider java"). Not 5: common synonyms like "tracing", "distributed tracing", or "opentelemetry java" are absent from the explicit list; the "any Java-related OTel question" catch-all softens the gap but does not name them.

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

The Java scoping and Java-specific class-name triggers establish a clear niche, but the "any Java-related OTel question" catch-all leaves minor overlap risk with closely related sibling OTel skills (e.g., a language-agnostic declarative-config skill would also match a Java YAML question). Not 5 for that residual overlap; not 3 because the explicit triggers are strongly Java-specific.