Conciseness

The body is largely lean with concrete commands and code, but the Overview's five-step lifecycle explanation and the "The Broker stores..." bullets re-explain Pact concepts Claude already knows — brief framing, yet trimmable, fitting the efficient-with-minor-over-explanation anchor at 4 rather than the padded anchor at 3.

Actionability

Guidance is fully executable and copy-paste ready throughout: an install command, a complete PactV3 consumer test, the pact-broker publish command with all flags, a full Verifier configuration, state handlers, and can-i-deploy / record-deployment commands with a flags table and exit codes — covering the common cases end to end.

Workflow Clarity

The five-step lifecycle is numbered up front and every section follows that order, with the can-i-deploy gate and its exit codes acting as an explicit checkpoint and troubleshooting notes ("Skipping this step is the most common reason can-i-deploy returns spurious 'no' verdicts") — but there is no explicit fix-and-retry loop when provider verification fails, so it fits anchor 4 rather than 5.

Progressive Disclosure

The SKILL.md body is a clear overview with core quick-start content inline, and the CI detail is appropriately split into a real, clearly signaled, one-level-deep reference — "Full consumer and provider GitHub Actions steps are in [references/ci-pipelines.md](references/ci-pipelines.md)" — which exists in the bundle and contains no nested references, matching the well-signaled anchor at 5.

Specificity

The description lists four concrete, named actions — "set up Pact consumer-driven contract tests, publish pacts to a broker, verify the provider and gate deploys with can-i-deploy" — covering the full contract-testing lifecycle with no coverage gap, matching the comprehensive-coverage anchor rather than the minor-gaps anchor at 4.

Completeness

It explicitly answers both questions: the "what" is the four concrete actions, and the "when" is the explicit trigger clause "Use whenever two services (a frontend and an API, or two microservices) keep breaking each other's API" — clearly matching the anchor requiring concrete trigger phrases for both.

Trigger Term Quality

It includes natural user phrasings like "two services... keep breaking each other's API", "two microservices", "frontend and an API", plus tool terms "Pact", "contract tests", and "can-i-deploy", but a few natural variations such as "API compatibility" or "integration between services" are missing, which fits the good-but-not-comprehensive anchor at 4 rather than 5.

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

It occupies a clear niche (Pact consumer-driven contract testing) with a distinctive trigger scenario that a generic testing or API skill would not fire on, matching the minimal-conflict-risk anchor at 5 rather than the minor-overlap anchor at 4.