webcmd-adapter-author skill: root webcmd-plugin.json step is documented but skippable — should be enforced, not optional

[ngaurav]

Correction

I originally filed this suggesting the root webcmd-plugin.json registration step might be unnecessary and could be removed from the skill. That was the wrong read — flagging the correction: the fix should go the other way. The step is meant to be mandatory whenever a plugin is promoted into the repo; the actual bug is that the skill lets it be silently skipped with no error and no warning.

What the skill says

references/adapter-template.md in the webcmd-adapter-author skill documents this promotion sequence for turning a private CLI into a repo plugin (also referenced from SKILL.md line 260):

webcmd plugin create <site> --dir plugins/<site> --description "<site> commands for Webcmd"
cp ~/.webcmd/clis/<site>/*.js plugins/<site>/
rm plugins/<site>/hello.ts plugins/<site>/greet.ts 2>/dev/null || true

Then add <site> to the root webcmd-plugin.json plugins map:

"<site>": {
  "path": "plugins/<site>",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "description": "<site> commands for Webcmd",
  "webcmd": ">=0.2.0"
}

What actually happens

Across three independent adapter builds in the same repo (manchester, warwick, mdxdubai), the root-manifest step was skipped every single time. Nothing in webcmd plugin create, webcmd plugin install file://..., or webcmd validate <site> errors, warns, or otherwise signals that a required step was missed — the commands all succeed and the plugin works, so there's no feedback loop that would catch the omission. The repo now has three plugins/<site>/webcmd-plugin.json files (one per plugin) but no root-level webcmd-plugin.json registering any of them.

Why this matters

The skill presents the root-manifest edit as a required part of the promotion sequence, but nothing enforces it — an agent (or a human following the same doc) can complete the entire promotion flow, see every command succeed, and never know the repo-level registration was left out. That's a silent, discoverable-only-by-omission gap, which is worse than either (a) the tooling itself failing loudly if the manifest is missing, or (b) the skill treating it as a real checklist item with a verification step.

Suggested fix

• Add an explicit verification step to adapter-template.md right after the root-manifest edit — e.g. grep -q '"<site>"' webcmd-plugin.json || echo "MISSING: <site> not registered in root webcmd-plugin.json" — so an agent following the skill has to actively confirm the step landed, not just perform an edit and move on.
• Consider whether webcmd validate <site> or webcmd plugin install could themselves warn when a plugin exists under plugins/<site> but isn't listed in a root webcmd-plugin.json, so the gap is caught by tooling instead of relying on an agent following documentation to the letter.