forge-skillslisted

# Forge Skills — what they are & how to author them A Forge **skill** is an instruction set an AI agent runs on a project. This meta-skill explains how Forge executes skills and the standard for writing/customizing them so they run correctly and don't waste tokens. Read it before touching a project's skills. Since ISS-895 there is **no status → skill ladder**. One job type is dispatched, `drive`, and it runs `issue-flow` from the `forge` Claude Code plugin — not from the skill store. What you author here is a **user-invocable** skill an agent or an operator calls by name. ## 1. What Forge does with a skill (runtime model) - **One job type, one skill.** A `drive` job loads `issue-flow` (plugin-delivered) as its instructions — never all skills at once, and never one resolved from a status. - **Per job the agent gets:** the skill body + a **shared preamble** (status ladder, complexity/priority enums, relation kinds, handoff schema, `branchConfig`, creds-as-pointer) that Forge injects and **prompt-caches** + a check-in bundle from `forge_step_start`. `references/*.md` load **only when the agent reads them** (lazy) — so they cost nothing until needed. - **Scope & shadowing (ISS-388):** global skills are **read-only templates**. A project customizes one by creating a **same-name project skill**, which **shadows** the global for that project. There is no fork/override — just shadow-by-name. `forge_skills_effective` dedups by name (one row per name + `shadowsGlobal`). - **Server-