refactor(skills): retire long-form aliases

[d-morrison]

Closes #1852
Closes #2368

Summary

• retire nine long-form redirect-only skill directories while preserving their canonical skills and short aliases
• regenerate the Codex wrapper tree and remove stale documentation references to retired invocation names
• recover durable routing headroom instead of raising the listing cap again

Skill-listing impact

Measured on 2026-08-30 against the current branch:

Metric	Before	After	Change
skill entries	199	190	-9
listing characters	8,960	8,549	-411
headroom under 9,000	40	451	+411

No canonical workflow is removed. The change retires redirect-only long-form aliases and leaves the documented canonical skills available.

Validation

• python3 scripts/validate-skills.py
• python3 scripts/test_validate_skills.py (25 passed)
• python3 scripts/check-links.py
• npx --yes markdownlint-cli2@0.22.1 ... (0 errors)
• exact vendored new-line-breaks gate (clean)
• git diff --check
• independent adversarial review: clean on e3f4f1c70f218cd41e27f06497fdcbef580fe306

Posted by Codex CLI (AI agent) --- not written by a human.

[github-actions]

PR Preview Action v1.8.1
Preview removed because the pull request was closed.

_{2026-08-31 01:12 UTC}

[github-actions]

Claude finished review — View run

---

This matches the table's existing empty-aliases-column convention (e.g. post-merge, handoff rows), so it's consistent formatting.

I've completed a thorough review of this PR. Summary of what I checked:

• Read the full diff (27 files: skill deletions, codex-skills wrapper deletions, and reference cleanups across README.md, docs/, memories/preferences.md, setup.qmd, skills.qmd, and several SKILL.md files).
• Verified against issue Alias directories are 27% of the skill-listing budget: 71 entries, 2181 chars #1852: the PR implements exactly the "low-risk first slice" the issue recommends (retire long-form alias directories whose canonical is itself a short name, keep every short alias) — including address-rebut-defer which wasn't in the issue's illustrative table but fits the same criterion.
• Repo-wide grep for all 9 retired alias names found zero remaining references anywhere (docs, skills, memories, hooks, scripts, manifests).
• Ran scripts/sync-codex-skill-wrappers.py --check — wrappers in sync (190).
• Ran scripts/check-links.py — no broken relative links (2797 checked).
• Ran scripts/validate-skills.py — all skills/manifests valid, budget 8549/9000 chars.
• Ran scripts/check-stale-records.py — no new orphans or stale-but-referenced files introduced by this PR.
• Spot-checked prose edits (memories/preferences.md, skills/resolve-conflicts/SKILL.md, skills/clean-worktrees/SKILL.md, skills.qmd) for grammar correctness after removing alias mentions — all read correctly when rendered.
• Confirmed the issue's "Not proposed here" caveat (investigating a lossless delist-but-keep-resolvable approach) is explicitly out of scope for this issue, not a gap in this PR.

No new findings. No code-logic bugs, no CLAUDE.md/lab-manual violations, no hallucinated references, and no dangling links or stale generated artifacts.

Verdict

Ready for merge

Reviewed commit: c920064

[github-actions]

💰 Cost: $1.1064 (review) — run