Files
small-scripts/memory/log/2026-03-17.105314.md
Paul O'Reilly 22db5514f8 Add memory files, reflection state, and update docs
Memory files for decisions, bash gotchas, and process lessons.
Updated MEMORY.md index and README.md with new scripts.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-03-17 11:14:44 +13:00

1.2 KiB

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