Scope Overload

Scope overload occurs when a single skill description covers too many distinct intents. This makes routing unreliable because the model has to match a broad range of user requests to one skill.

Detection

Homingo flags a skill as overloaded based on:

• Description length exceeding 1024 characters
• Multi-intent patterns: multiple semicolons, excessive clauses, repeated "and [verb]" patterns
• Intent count: distinct functional intents embedded in a single description

The Problem

Consider a skill with this description:

"Handles all financial operations including invoice generation, expense tracking, budget forecasting, tax calculation, payment processing, and financial report generation."

This skill is doing six different jobs. The model will route any finance-related prompt to it — even when a more specific skill exists. It also makes the fleet harder to debug because failures could come from any of the six intents.

The Solution: Sharding

When Homingo detects an overloaded skill, it proposes a shard plan:

1. Identify distinct intents embedded in the description
2. Create focused sub-skills — one per intent, each with a tight description
3. Create an orchestrator skill — routes between the sub-skills with clear decision logic

Example Shard Plan

Before: One "Financial Operations" skill covering 6 intents

After:

• invoice-generation — focused on creating invoices
• expense-tracking — focused on expense management
• budget-forecasting — focused on budget projections
• financial-operations-orchestrator — routes between the three sub-skills

Using Sharding in Homingo

# See which skills are overloaded
homingo lint --dry-run

# Run full lint with scope overload analysis
homingo lint

# Force analysis on all skills, not just flagged ones
homingo lint --force

# Apply shard plans (creates new skill directories)
homingo lint --fix

When NOT to Shard

Not every long description needs sharding:

• Early-stage skills with intentionally broad scope may be fine until the fleet grows
• Orchestrator skills are designed to be broad — that's their job
• Skills with related sub-tasks that genuinely belong together

Use --force to analyze a specific skill even if it's under the length threshold, and use your judgment on whether the shard plan makes sense.

Further Reading

• Routing Drift — how overloaded skills contribute to drift
• Skill Format — how to structure skill descriptions
• homingo lint — the command that detects scope overload