Invoke describe-change.sh via the templated script path in orchestrated-coder's commit-title rule

[williamthorsen]

Problem

The orchestrated-coder subagent definition (subagents/orchestrated-coder.md, "Commit formatting" <HARD-GATE>, rule 1) tells the coder to render commit titles "using describe-change.sh", but it names the script in prose without giving a runnable command, and it never adopted the {platform_home_dir}/scripts/ path convention that every other consumer of the script uses. The rule also carries a silent escape hatch ("If the script is not found, fall back to the bare title") that downgrades a hard-gate requirement without surfacing the downgrade. The observed effect is commits shipping without the configured {scope}|{type}: prefix, undetected until PR review.

Context

• The install-time path-resolution mechanism the original version of this ticket proposed already exists. The install pipeline expands {platform_home_dir} to the platform home (~/.claude, ~/.codex, and so on), the established convention is to invoke helper scripts as {platform_home_dir}/scripts/<script>.sh, and script-invocation-conventions.test.ts enforces that prefix on every helper-script invocation in agent and skill content. The ticket has therefore been narrowed to the one place that mechanism was never applied.
• Rule 1 escaped that guard because it is a prose mention (the script name in backticks, no command), which the convention deliberately exempts. Legitimate prose mentions exist elsewhere (for example, commit/SKILL.md points readers to title-templates.md), so the guard cannot simply flag all mentions.
• Every other describe-change.sh consumer (condense-branch, create-ticket, create-pr, merge-pr, and title-templates.md itself) already shows a runnable {platform_home_dir}/scripts/describe-change.sh … command. Rule 1 is the lone straggler, and the sibling resolve-frontmatter.sh call in this same file already uses the prefixed form.
• The orchestrated-coder runs only inside an orchestrated dispatch, where aborting on a rendering failure would lose the run. Because the resolved path makes "script not found" a non-issue, this ticket removes the fallback rather than replacing it with failure-handling text. Verifying that referenced files are actually present after install is a separate concern, tracked in Add a validator that checks all agent- and skill-referenced files resolve after install #790.

Proposed solution

Rewrite rule 1 of the "Commit formatting" hard-gate so it provides a runnable invocation of describe-change.sh through the {platform_home_dir}/scripts/ prefix and reads commit_title from the JSON output, matching the pattern the other consumers already use. Remove the silent "fall back to the bare title" clause without adding replacement failure-handling. Drop the inaccurate cross-reference to title-templates.md (the coder derives scope, type, and title from the git commit conventions skill it already follows, and the template internals are the script's concern). Once rule 1 is a real invocation carrying the prefix, the existing convention test covers it automatically, so no new test is needed.

Acceptance criteria

Must have

• orchestrated-coder.md "Commit formatting" rule 1 invokes describe-change.sh through the {platform_home_dir}/scripts/ prefix and reads commit_title from the JSON output.
• The silent "fall back to the bare title" clause is removed from rule 1, with no failure-handling instruction added in its place.
• No bare-name (unprefixed) reference to describe-change.sh remains in orchestrated-coder.md.
• After install, the generated orchestrated-coder.md will contain an absolute, runnable describe-change.sh invocation.

[williamthorsen]

Recurrence data point from orchestrated run 20260615-085959Z (ticket #783).

describe-change.sh is still absent from the installed skills tree. In this environment skills install under ~/.claude/skills/ (not the ~/.rovodev/ paths in the original report), and find ~/.claude/skills -name describe-change.sh returns nothing. The script is present in source at packages/agents/content/scripts/describe-change.sh (and dist/content/scripts/), so this is an install/sync gap, not a missing source file.

This run's coder hit the fallback but hand-constructed titles in the correct {scope}|{type}: format anyway, so all 9 commits shipped correctly prefixed (agents|feat:, agents|fix:, agents|tests:, agents|docs:, agents|refactor:). The silent-downgrade failure mode did not bite this time, but the root cause (the script is not resolvable at the invocation site) persists, and correct output depended on the coder's judgment rather than the helper.

The install-prefix discrepancy (~/.claude here vs ~/.rovodev in the original report) may be worth folding into the path-resolution fix, so the substituted absolute path tracks the actual install prefix.

[williamthorsen]

Superseded by #791.

#791 reframes this around the actual root cause: the subagent installer never applies path rewriting, so installed subagents ship the literal {platform_home_dir} token instead of a runnable path. The original framing here assumed the install-time path-resolution mechanism already covered subagents — it covers skills and shared guidance only. #791 also broadens scope to every subagent script reference (for example resolve-frontmatter.sh), not just describe-change.sh, and folds in the orchestrated-coder.md commit-title revision.

Closing as not planned in favor of #791.