Files

Paul O'Reilly 6dfa20c47c End-of-session: transcript tracking log, context update, README docs

- Add session log (2026-04-13) covering transcript backup tracking system
- Add context/transcript-tracking.md: first-run verification checklist for
  the Sonnet subagent path in /log
- Update CONTEXT.md with transcript tracking entry
- Update README.md: document extract-transcripts.py and list-transcripts-here.sh;
  note that install-hooks.sh now covers skill-helper scripts too
- Prune 3 reflected logs older than retention_days (7): 2026-03-23, -25, -29

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-04-13 14:09:22 +12:00

3.1 KiB

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Session Log — 2026-04-13

Summary

Built a complete pre-compaction transcript backup tracking system: fixed the broken pre-compact-backup.sh hook, created extract-transcripts.py and list-transcripts-here.sh, updated the /log skill to dispatch a Sonnet subagent for transcript analysis, moved all scripts to their canonical homes in claude-foundations, and ensured both active profiles are in sync.

Decisions

Decision: Use Sonnet (not Haiku) for transcript analysis subagent in /log — Rationale: gotcha detection requires judgment about backtracking and failed attempts; Haiku tends to see only the final outcome and miss the failure mode that led to it
Decision: /log pre-gathers only transcript metadata (compact JSON) not content — Rationale: full transcript content would overflow context; content reading delegated to the Sonnet subagent in its own fresh context window
Decision: Tracking file at ~/.claude/transcript-backups/tracking.json (machine-readable JSON) — Rationale: both hook (bash) and skill (python) need to update it; JSON is simpler to parse than markdown tables from bash
Decision: Scripts live in claude-foundations/scripts/, symlinked to ~/.claude/scripts/ — Rationale: consistent with hooks pattern; ~/.claude/scripts/ is a fixed path accessible from all profiles since ~/.claude/ always resolves to the default profile dir
Decision: install-hooks.sh extended with a curated SKILL_HELPERS array to manage skill-helper script symlinks — Rationale: not all claude-foundations scripts belong in ~/.claude/scripts/, only ones referenced by skills

Gotchas Discovered

[hooks] Symptom: pre-compact-backup.sh was silently skipping every run — Fix: Claude Code's PreCompact hook no longer provides transcript_path in the JSON input (changed from older versions); derive path from session_id + cwd using ~/.claude/projects/$(cwd | tr '/' '-')/<session_id>.jsonl
[python] Symptom: cwd extraction loop printed multiple lines instead of stopping at first match — Fix: sys.exit(0) inside except: pass is caught as SystemExit; use a break or don't use bare except when early exit is needed inside exception handlers
[skills] Symptom: SKILL.md validator error on bang command using $(pwd) — Fix: $() substitution in SKILL.md bang commands is rejected by the Claude Code permission checker; create a wrapper shell script that runs $(pwd) internally and call the wrapper from the bang command instead

Key Context

Old transcript backups with -auto suffix (before tracking system) are not in tracking.json and will never appear in --list; they'll be pruned by the 30-day cleanup in the hook
Profile parity fix: ~/.claude-octopus/skills/switch-mode symlink was missing; added
~/.claude/scripts/ is the canonical location for skill-helper scripts; ~/.claude/ always resolves to the default profile dir, making it accessible from all profiles regardless of CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR
The Sonnet subagent in /log writes to the project's absolute memory/log/ path — worth verifying on first real run that it uses the absolute path correctly, not a relative one from the wrong cwd

3.1 KiB Raw Blame History