# Session Log — 2026-03-17

## Summary
Diagnosed why the `/housekeeping` skill (created last session) failed to load — an em dash in the YAML frontmatter description silently broke parsing. Fixed the skill and added a non-ASCII frontmatter check to `validate-skill`.

## Gotchas Discovered
- **[skills]** Symptom: Skill installed correctly (symlink, SKILL.md present) but Claude Code reports "Unknown skill" — Fix: Non-ASCII characters (em dashes `—`, smart quotes, etc.) in YAML frontmatter silently prevent skill loading. Replace with ASCII equivalents. Claude commonly generates em dashes, so this is a recurring risk.

## Key Context
- The fix was replacing `—` (UTF-8 `\xe2\x80\x94`) with `-` in the `description: >` field of `custom-claude-skills/skills/housekeeping/SKILL.md`
- Non-ASCII in the skill body (below frontmatter) is fine — only the YAML-parsed frontmatter is affected

## Process Notes
- `cat -A` was the key diagnostic — showed `M-bM-^@M-^T` bytes revealing the em dash that looked identical to a regular dash in normal display
- Added the check to validate-skill with: script change, spec update, test fixture + 2 assertions — all 45 tests pass