Files
small-scripts/memory/gotchas-skills.md
Paul O'Reilly 8e978fef9d Reflect 3 session logs into topic memory files
New: gotchas-skills.md (non-ASCII frontmatter, per-profile skill dirs).
Updated: gotchas-bash.md (+((var++)) with zero), decisions.md (+python3
for JSON), process-lessons.md (+cat -A diagnostic).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-03-17 11:22:20 +13:00

857 B

Skills Gotchas

Non-ASCII characters in YAML frontmatter silently prevent skill loading

Claude Code skills with em dashes (--- U+2014), smart quotes, or other non-ASCII in the YAML frontmatter description field will fail to load with "Unknown skill" — no error message, no warning. The body below frontmatter can contain any characters. Claude commonly generates em dashes, so this is a recurring risk. Always run validate-skill before committing a skill.

Each Claude profile has independent skills directories

Skills symlinked into ~/.claude/skills/ are NOT available in other profiles (e.g., ~/.claude-octopus/skills/). Each profile maintains a completely independent skills directory. The CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR env var identifies the active profile at runtime — use ${CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR:-$HOME/.claude}/skills in install scripts.