StarCi Skills

StarCi Skills is the runtime that completes one StarCi mission. It is a tree of files, not a framework: SKILL.md is the entry, operators/ holds the fourteen units of work, workflows/ holds the example chains, and routing.json is the closed map that decides what happens after each one. INDEX.md states the load order and says plainly what the tree is for — it “is the runtime”, and SKILL.md is “the single entry that freezes a mission’s scope, selects the one operator that owns the outcome, and routes between operators on typed results.”

This site explains that tree and links into it. It never restates a rule: where a rule exists in the tree, the page quotes the file or links to it, and every page under Reference is generated from the same files the runtime reads.

One entry

There is exactly one way in. SKILL.md freezes the mission scope, runs workspace.bind for anything that touches routed source, looks for a workflow, selects the first operator, and then sequences the rest. It does no work of its own: “it never decides a value, writes source, or judges a result.”

Its Entry table maps a request to its first operator — which project applies goes to workspace.bind, what the product promises goes to business.decide, whether a rendered surface holds up goes to frontend.surface.audit, and so on. A request that names no owner, or two owners whose scopes differ materially, stops there with one focused question.

Fourteen operators

An operator is one job in one linear pass. It never calls another operator, never routes a workflow, never pauses internally, and never returns free-form control instructions. The parent alone maps a validated output to the next transition. Each operator is one authored operator.md — Job, its own law sections, then the Context, Inputs, Requirements, Steps, Outputs, Stops and Next tables — beside an operator.json, an errors.json, a validate.mjs and a self-test.mjs.

See Operator for the shape, and the operator reference for all fourteen packages.

Workflows

A workflow is a pre-composed chain: ordered steps, each step a list of branches that run in parallel, with optional loops back to an earlier step and presets for a branch’s Requirements. The eight files in workflows/ are examples, not the only chains allowed; when none matches, the entry composes one under the rules scripts/validate-workflows.mjs enforces on those same files.

See Workflow and the workflow reference.

The request/response session

Everything an operator receives and everything it produces lives on disk, inside one session folder, in a fixed branch layout. The loop SKILL.md states is short:

request/request.json -> validate-request.mjs -> agent writes response/ -> validate-response.mjs + the operator's validate.mjs -> route

Routing reads response.json and nothing else. A response that fails either validator does not route; prose in response.md does not route. See Session and Kinds and contracts.

Why knowledge is split three ways

knowledge/ is decision authority, not workflow, and it is split by the operator that reads it. knowledge/ui/ is the universal UI law shared by every published Grammar family, itself grouped into composition (what a tree must contain, before it exists), presentation (which CSS value an app-owned boundary takes) and proof (what is only true once rendered). knowledge/grammars/<family>/ is one visual family’s realization of Common — the owner’s taste and what the package actually exposes. knowledge/patterns/fe and knowledge/patterns/be are the code conventions extracted from the two live sources, where every rule cites the files it was read from.

The test that places a topic, in knowledge/ui/INDEX.md, is whether reading source answers it: a spacing value is readable from a class, so it is presentation; the number of dominant actions is settled before any tree exists, so it is composition; whether keyboard order matches visual order needs a running page, so it is proof.

See Knowledge and the knowledge reference.

Language

English .md files are the only runtime authority. Same-stem .vi.md files are human mirrors and never enter a context manifest, a dependency list, a validator input, or an operator binding. This site keeps the same split: the English pages are the ones that match the runtime, and the Vietnamese pages mirror them for a human reader.