Extending OSED

OSED is built to be extended — a new instrument template, a new skill, a new state ERA packet — without weakening the guardrails that make its output safe to hand a lawyer. The contributing guide (../../../CONTRIBUTING.md) is the full reference; this page is the orientation.

What you can add

• A template (templates/) — the structural model is cwa-505-notice-of-intent.md: a DRAFT banner, a required-elements checklist, inline [⚠ ATTORNEY: ...] flags, a deadline note, and a consolidated attorney-flags section. Follow it; an omitted required element is how these instruments fail in court.
• A skill (skills/) — YAML frontmatter (name, description) plus an imperative-voice body. The description is the trigger: make it specific and explicit about what the skill will not do. Every skill includes a worked example with both good and bad behavior, where the bad example shows the exact boundary being crossed.

The invariants you must not regress

Any change to a skill or template must keep the six invariants intact — DRAFT banners, inline flags, the currency check, no invented facts, no merits calls, and refusal of bad-faith uses. A change that weakens one is wrong even if it makes the output look more polished.

The eval harness enforces it

evals/ turns those prose guardrails into checks that can actually fail. The rule: a change to skills/ or templates/ must keep cd evals && pytest green, and CI enforces it. Two lanes:

• Deterministic core (CI-safe, no secrets) — exact-string / regex / forbidden-phrase / section-header checks against recorded transcripts (the DRAFT banner, [⚠ ATTORNEY: ...], [placeholder], required sections).
• --live (gated; needs Claude Code auth) — runs a skill via claude -p and adds an LLM judge for negation-sensitive checks (refusal under pressure; was every judgment call flagged).

See ../../../evals/README.md for the harness, fixtures, and how to add golden transcripts.

Plugin-safe resource convention

When a skill references a bundled resource, use the ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} convention in skill prose so the path resolves whether OSED is run from a clone or installed as a plugin. (This is the plugin resource root for skills — not ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}.)