Bug: validate_all checks evolved_body instead of evolved_full, causing all evolved skills to fail skill_structure

[wl-lgtm]

Bug Summary

In evolution/skills/evolve_skill.py, the evolved skill is reassembled with frontmatter on line 185, but the validation on line 189 checks the body-only text. This causes the skill_structure constraint to falsely fail every evolved skill because evolved_body has no YAML frontmatter.

Reproduction

Run any skill evolution (e.g. plan, github-code-review, systematic-debugging). The optimizer completes successfully, but validation fails with:

✗ skill_structure: Skill missing: YAML frontmatter (---), name field, description field

Meanwhile, the saved evolved_FAILED.md contains valid frontmatter:

---
name: plan
description: Plan mode for Hermes — inspect context, write a markdown plan...
---

Root Cause

Line 185 correctly assembles the full skill:

evolved_full = reassemble_skill(skill["frontmatter"], evolved_body)

Line 189 incorrectly validates the body only:

evolved_constraints = validator.validate_all(evolved_body, "skill", baseline_text=skill["body"])

Fix

Change line 189 from evolved_body to evolved_full:

evolved_constraints = validator.validate_all(evolved_full, "skill", baseline_text=skill["body"])

Evidence

I hit this on 5 consecutive skill evolutions. All had valid frontmatter, all scored well (57-67%), all were falsely rejected:

Skill	Score	Rejected By
systematic-debugging	66.47%	skill_structure
github-code-review	58.45%	skill_structure
plan	63.66%	skill_structure
llm-wiki	57.87%	skill_structure + size_limit*
test-driven-development	67.58%	skill_structure

*llm-wiki also genuinely exceeded size, but skill_structure was the first blocker.

Environment

• Commit: c763e85 (latest main as of 2026-04-22)
• Python 3.11
• DSPy 2.x

[steezkelly]

Status note for anyone following this specific validator bug:

This root cause is fixed in the steezkelly/hermes-agent-self-evolution fork and is also covered by upstream PRs #49/#51/#50/#32.

The essential fix is exactly what this issue identifies: validate the reassembled full skill (evolved_full, with YAML frontmatter), not body-only markdown (evolved_body). Body-only validation will always fail skill_structure because load_skill() has already stripped the frontmatter.

Current fork verification after the latest dependency cleanup:

• fork: https://github.com/steezkelly/hermes-agent-self-evolution
• latest tested commit: steezkelly@a7117d2
• command: pip install -e '.[dev]' && pytest -q
• result: 266 passed, 11 warnings

I am trying to keep these notes targeted rather than spammy: if someone lands here from the false skill_structure failure, the fork has a working path while upstream PRs wait for review.