~/.agents/skills was a single link straight at this checkout. That encoded an
assumption nobody had stated — that this checkout is the only source of skills
on the host. On flamingo it was not: Crush's directory held Anthropic's
official set, and the only way to install this library was to move that set
aside. A capability loss dressed up as a tidy-up.
The canonical location becomes a real directory of per-skill symlinks, fed by
the checkout plus anything in SKILLS_EXTRA_SOURCES. Harnesses keep their one
directory link, so the count is N + one per harness rather than N x harnesses,
which is what #23 was actually about.
The three requirements #27 named, each with a test:
- collisions are logged with both paths and the checkout wins, never resolved
in silence;
- removing a skill from a source prunes its link;
- anything in the managed directory that is not our symlink is reported and
left in place — the installer does not delete content it did not create.
doctor learns the same model: sources are recorded at ~/.agents/skills-sources,
a link into a configured source is healthy, a link into an unknown one is not,
and the old count check becomes a per-skill check because a per-skill layout
can lose one skill without changing any total. The pre-#27 wiring is named as
legacy rather than reported as damage. count_skills needed find -L; without it
symlinked skill directories count as zero.
Verified live on koala: migrated in place to 42 per-skill links, then a second
source added a 43rd alongside them, then a re-run without that source pruned it
back to 42. Only doctor finding throughout was the genuine stale plugin.
Closes#27
Bump-Type: minor
Every other check in doctor is about symlink paths. That is the wrong shape
for Claude Code, which has no symlinks — it has the plugin, and it gates
updates on plugin.json's version. A host that never picked up a release loads
every skill successfully and is simply a generation behind, silently.
Found live while writing this: koala had skills@mathias 0.6.0 installed, a
marketplace clone at 0.7.0 and a checkout at 0.8.4, and doctor said "clean".
doctor now compares the version recorded in installed_plugins.json against the
newest manifest already on the host — the active checkout and any marketplace
clone, filtered to plugin.json files that actually name this plugin — and fails
naming both versions. Offline, like the rest of doctor: "available" never means
a fetch.
A host with no install record is a valid symlink-only configuration and stays
clean. --json grows a "plugin":{"installed","available"} object so per-host
results can be collected without parsing prose.
Four new fixture cases: match, stale, absent record, newer marketplace clone.
Live output on koala:
FAIL plugin-version: Claude Code has skills@mathias 0.6.0 installed but
0.8.4 is available on this host
Closes#30
Bump-Type: minor
Found on flamingo during the first Mac install. ~/.config/crush/skills held
real directories from a pre-plugin install, and doctor said:
FAIL outside: ~/.config/crush/skills resolves to ~/.config/crush/skills,
outside the active checkout ~/.local/share/skills/skills
Naming a directory as its own resolution target is true and useless. Worse, it
pointed at the wrong fix: "outside" means a link into a foreign checkout, which
you repair by re-pointing the link. A real directory is repaired by moving it
aside and re-running install.sh — install.sh already refuses to delete it,
correctly, since it did not create it and cannot know what is in there.
Now reported as its own class, with the skill count so it is obvious whether
the directory holds a stale copy of the library or something unique that
belongs in the repo:
FAIL unmanaged: <dir> is a real directory, not a link into the checkout —
it holds N unmanaged skill(s); move it aside and re-run install.sh
The distinction matters because content in that directory reaches exactly one
harness and cannot receive new skills — the failure mode is silent divergence,
which is the same family as everything else this tool exists to catch.
Bump-Type: patch
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
Every failure this fleet actually hit was silent. 243 dangling symlinks were
invisible to git because **/.claude/skills/ is in the global gitignore. A
checkout 20 skills behind still resolved, so nothing complained. A loose
secret-hygiene.md loaded in no harness and errored in none. Two machines had
the library missing entirely. Exit status is the signal that was absent.
bin/doctor reports, with a non-zero exit:
- dangling links, anywhere under the harness dirs
- links that RESOLVE but land outside the active checkout — the dangerous
case, because it works while serving stale content
- skill-count mismatch between a harness and the checkout
- stray entries where <name>/SKILL.md was expected
- leftover per-skill Claude symlinks (plugin skills do not override
same-named user skills, so leftovers mean everything loads twice)
- divergence between the plugin copy and the copy the other harnesses link to
Wired as a SessionStart hook with --quiet, so a healthy host prints nothing and
a drifting one says so at the top of the next session. That beats a timer:
no launchd/systemd wiring, and it reaches every host that installs the plugin.
27ms on koala, no network, no git fetch.
Two design points found by the tests, both worth keeping:
- The canonical checkout is whatever ~/.agents/skills resolves to, NOT the
copy doctor runs from. As a plugin hook $0 lives in the plugin cache, which
is legitimately a second copy; judging harness links against it flagged
every one of them as "outside".
- "cd X/.." resolves ".." lexically against the link path and lands back in
~/.agents. Resolve the link first, then take the parent.
tests/doctor_test.sh drives seven fixtures through $HOME and $DOCTOR_CHECKOUT,
so no test touches the real host. Each asserts both the non-zero exit and that
the report names the fault — an exit-code-only assertion would pass while the
message said nothing useful.
Bump-Type: minor
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
mathias
