Overview

What It Helps You Do

Use this skill to audit your OpenSpec archive for long-term inconsistencies that accumulate across many changes.

Activate it with:

• /accelint-archive-synthesis
• Phrases like "run archive synthesis" or "lint the openspec archive"
• Related requests about decision drift, index reconciliation, or cross-change consistency

It helps you find:

• Decision contradictions where archived changes no longer agree with each other
• Stale index entries where specs/INDEX.md drifted from actual spec files
• Over-coupled capabilities whose relationship counts suggest boundary problems

Unlike other QRSPI/OpenSpec tools that validate individual changes forward, this skill looks backward across the full archive to check whether it still coheres with itself.

When to Use

Use this skill when:

• accelint-qrspi-archive suggests synthesis (typically after 15+ changes)
• Checking whether an old design decision still holds
• Verifying specs/INDEX.md matches actual spec files on disk
• Finding over-coupled refactor candidates
• Auditing before a major milestone

How It Works

The skill runs three corpus-wide checks:

Decision Drift — identifies archived changes that appear to contradict each other about the same or related capabilities, then verifies only the flagged candidates in detail.

Index Reconciliation — confirms every specs/INDEX.md row still points to a real capability and matches its actual spec.md content.

Structural Coupling — flags capabilities whose related: count is both at least 5 and double the index median, signaling possible boundary sprawl.

Each check surfaces findings at CRITICAL/WARNING/SUGGESTION severity. For confirmed findings, the skill can update Status in the archive index, patch reconciliation mismatches, or route to relevant writer skills.

What You Get

A structured report showing what changed since last run:

## Archive Synthesis Report — 2026-07-06
Corpus: 47 archived changes, 22 capabilities

### CRITICAL
- [Decision contradiction with actively-touched capability]

### WARNING  
- [Index row disagrees with its spec.md]

### SUGGESTION
- [Structural coupling above threshold]

For each finding you choose:

• Confirm — updates status, patches index row, or routes to writer skill
• Dismiss — for decision drift, never resurfaces; for others, rechecked next run
• Defer — left as-is, resurfaces next run

Prerequisites

• OpenSpec CLI installed and initialized
• accelint-qrspi-archive in regular use (both indexes must exist)
• Sub-agent support for targeted file reads
• Read access to openspec/specs/ directory
• Writer skills support findings: interface for automatic routing

Good to know: If writer skills don't support findings: yet, you get the report and manual routing guidance instead.

Good to Know

Good to know: Dismissed decision-drift pairs persist to SYNTHESIS-LOG.md so they never resurface. Dismissed coupling/reconciliation findings do not persist — they're rechecked every run against current state.

Good to know: Confirmed reconciliation findings patch specs/INDEX.md directly, but never edit the spec files themselves.

Good to know: The 15-change trigger and structural coupling thresholds are defaults you can adjust. The skill reports when they look mismatched for your corpus, but never changes them automatically.

Limits

This skill does not:

• Run automatically or block other workflows
• Edit hub docs directly (routes through writer skills)
• Touch design.md or spec.md files (reads only)
• Operate across repositories (local project only)

Examples

Example: Typical synthesis run after 15 changes

/accelint-archive-synthesis

# Finds 1 CRITICAL contradiction, 1 WARNING index mismatch, 1 SUGGESTION coupling
# You confirm all three
# Skill updates archive Status, patches index row, routes to writer skills
# Logs checkpoint for next run

Example: First-ever run on a small corpus

/accelint-archive-synthesis

# Warns: 6 archived changes is small, continue? Yes
# No findings (too few changes for signal)
# Creates SYNTHESIS-LOG.md for future runs

Example: Dismissed pair stays suppressed

# Run 1: You dismiss a decision-drift finding
# Recorded to SYNTHESIS-LOG.md dismissed: list

# Run 2 (months later):
/accelint-archive-synthesis

# Loads dismissed history, skips that pair without re-verification
# Only new candidates appear in this run's report