Implements #5's decision. The hard part was #37's, not #5's: which skills need
an escalation rule? A hardcoded list rots, sniffing the prose for "does this
write anything" is unfalsifiable, and a frontmatter flag is the option #5
rejected wearing a hat.
So there is no acting set. Every skill answers the question, and a read-only one
answers it in a line. That turns an absence into a claim someone can disagree
with, which is the whole point — "this skill never hands back" is a design
decision worth stating, and today it was indistinguishable from nobody having
thought about it.
Eleven written here, all advisory or read-only, where the honest answer is short
and the value is in being specific rather than generic. `cognitive-load` stops
when the metric disagrees with the people reading the code, because that is
evidence about the metric. `test-design` stops when the tests are fine and the
design under test is what makes them awkward. `code-review` stops when the diff
is big enough that a review would be a skim, and says so rather than producing
confident coverage of a fraction.
The remaining thirty are the acting set — writes, dispatches, credentials,
releases — and each needs a rule someone thought about rather than a rote
paragraph, so they sit in bin/escalation-pending.txt. That list only shrinks,
and it is self-cleaning: a listed skill that HAS a section fails the gate, so an
exemption cannot outlive its reason. Mutation-verified both ways.
Six test cases including the stale-entry case, because an exemption for a skill
that no longer exists is how a gate quietly stops covering something.
Refs #37, closes the mechanism half
Bump-Type: minor
Everything doctor checks compares copies already on the machine, deliberately —
it runs in a SessionStart hook where latency shows, and its header promises no
network I/O. That leaves exactly one case invisible, and #30 walked straight
into it: a host whose checkout, marketplace clone and installed plugin all agree
reads as clean while all three sit a release behind origin.
`--online` closes it with one `git ls-remote`, opt-in, for a scheduled per-host
job rather than the session hook. Comparison is by order, not equality, so a
host ahead of the newest tag — normal between a release commit and its tag —
stays quiet.
An unreachable remote is a WARN naming itself, not a staleness FAIL. "I could
not check" and "you are behind" are different answers, and collapsing them would
make a network blip look like a stale library.
The remote URL is never printed: a remote rewritten by url.insteadOf expands
into a live token, which is a documented way this fleet has leaked one before.
Five fixture cases through a $DOCTOR_LATEST_TAG_CMD seam, including one that
asserts the DEFAULT run performs no lookup at all — the promise in the header is
now a test, not a comment. Verified live on koala:
$ bin/doctor --online
FAIL behind: this host has 0.12.1; origin has released 0.13.4
$ bin/doctor
skills doctor: clean — 41 skills
Closes#38
Bump-Type: minor
Seven skills carried a `## Mode 2 Routing Note` citing a routing pod ("Plan 6")
that does not exist. Several admitted in their own text that nothing about the
skill changes between modes — so it was roughly ten lines of context on every
load for zero behavioural effect. The content is not worthless, just not
per-skill: it now lives as one table in README.md, with the caveat that nothing
depends on it.
The related line inside the session_log sections stays, because that one does
motivate behaviour — but it no longer cites a component that has never shipped.
It now says what is true: pass-rate is what a future routing decision would be
based on, and a skill that never logs contributes no evidence either way.
While in README: the contributing steps were stale enough to fail CI for anyone
who followed them. They said to add a row to SKILLS_INDEX.md by hand — the table
is generated now, and `task check` fails on a hand-edited diff — and listed none
of the four frontmatter keys the gates require. Step 4 now names the
pressure-test bar from #19 rather than leaving it to be discovered.
Closes#36
Bump-Type: patch
Nine skills documented the payload. None named `session_id`, which is the
tool's only required field. So every documented call was one the tool rejects —
an agent following any of them either failed the call or invented an id, and
invented ids do not group, which means the pass-rate the /pass-rate endpoint
computes was being assembled from entries that cannot be joined.
Found by the #19 pressure test against `debug`, which invented
`debug-signed-artifact-missing-2026-08-29` and said so: "my three entries are
only groupable by luck of naming". The grep afterwards showed it was fleet-wide,
not a `debug` bug.
Also removed: `duration_ms: <wall-clock>` in eight of them. An agent does not
observe a clock. The same run omitted it "rather than fabricate", which is the
good outcome; the bad outcome is the run that fabricates, and a made-up number
in a metrics stream is worse than a missing one. It is an optional field and is
now simply absent.
bin/check-session-log gates both, with tests. This is exactly the case #19 has
in mind for a small tool over prose: the rule is a grep, so it should be a gate,
not a note asking people to remember.
Closes part of #36
Bump-Type: patch
The previous note blamed infra#224 for cad and gitea-mcp being unreachable.
Both claims were wrong. infra#224 is closed, and closed deliberately: rather
than widening koala-homelab's grants, a second scoped token was provisioned at
~/.op-agent-write.env for AgentSecrets. Sourcing it makes `op vault list`
return AgentSecrets, and an MCP initialize against both endpoints returns 200 —
serverInfo gitea-mcp 0.1.0 and cad aed2aaf. Nothing about the services or the
proxying is blocked.
What is actually blocked is delivery into the session environment. By design no
single identity on koala reads both vaults, and the session env comes from one
`op run --env-file ~/.op-env` under the HomeLab-only token. A mixed-vault file
does not degrade gracefully: tested on a two-line copy, `op run` aborts on the
unresolvable reference and BRAIN_MCP_TOKEN goes unresolved with it — so
appending to ~/.op-env would take out the MCP servers that currently work.
Refs #32, #33
Bump-Type: patch
Both services are now proxied from koala and reachable: tailscale serve 8445 ->
127.0.0.1:31877 (cad) and 8446 -> 127.0.0.1:30340 (gitea-mcp). Both answer 401
unauthenticated, so the path is right and auth is enforced.
They stay out of mcpServers because neither token resolves on this host. The
static tokens live in the 1Password AgentSecrets vault; koala's op identity sees
HomeLab only:
op vault list -> HomeLab, and nothing else
op://HomeLab/CAD_STATIC_TOKEN -> could not find item
op://HomeLab/gitea-mcp-shared-token -> could not find item
That is infra#224, not the OAuth-discovery bug #32 and #33 both flagged as the
likely blocker. A live entry that cannot authenticate would fail on every
session start, so the wiring is recorded rather than enabled.
The item names come from the ExternalSecrets, read by reference only — no
secret value was retrieved, printed, or transformed at any point.
Refs #32, #33
Bump-Type: patch
The canonical Python stack has been pinned in ~/dev/.context/AGENT.md since
local-dev v0.3.1, and three skills still had Go examples with no Python
counterpart. Following the structure #18 settled on, and the existing
solid/references/go-adaptation.md precedent, each gets a reference file rather
than inline dilution of the primary doc.
The stack table itself is NOT copied into any of them — each cites AGENT.md as
its home. This repo spent today learning what a second copy of a fact costs.
Content is the part a linter cannot give you:
- clean-code: `raise X from e` as the analogue of `%w` error wrapping, dataclass
over `dict[str, Any]`, and the two traps where the broken version reads
tidier — mutable default arguments, and `if not amount:` for a value where
zero is legitimate.
- solid: `Protocol` over `ABC`, defined at the consumer, which is what makes DIP
real in Python; plus what does NOT carry over from the Go rewrite (return
structs/accept interfaces, embedding, package-as-deployment-unit).
- code-review: a Python anti-pattern table parallel to the Go one, opening with
the rule that a finding ruff or mypy already catches is not a review comment,
it is a question about why the gate is not running.
Refs #20
Bump-Type: minor
The discipline in tdd was already language-agnostic; the checklist under it was
not. A Python user inherited a mandatory `go test -race` box they can never tick
and never got told that `mypy --strict` belongs in the red gate.
Per #18's own comment and writing-skills' Multi-Language Dilution warning, the
main SKILL.md keeps ONE canonical inline example (Go, the default stack) and the
other four languages live in reference files: python, typescript, rust, java.
The RED run drove every change. A subagent given a Python task with the Go-only
skill reported, in its own words:
- "Everything from L169 to L244 is Go-only, and the verification checklist at
L326 silently inherits that Go-ness — which is why a Python user ends up with
a mandatory box (-race) they can never tick and a required gate (mypy
--strict) that isn't listed at all."
- "For a brand-new function, the first RED is always a collection-time
ImportError... The only clean resolutions are a stub that raises
NotImplementedError (production code before a red test?) or accepting
ImportError as a legitimate red. The skill picks neither, and this is the
single biggest gap." It now picks: that red is legitimate, and writing a stub
to satisfy the runner is the Iron Law with extra steps.
- The Go table-driven exemplar branches on a `wantErr` column inside the loop.
Translated literally that is a conditional assertion folding two behaviours
into one test — which this skill's own quality table forbids. The agent caught
itself mid-translation; both SKILL.md and python.md now say not to port it.
Also: the checklist names the static-analysis gate per language instead of
assuming `go vet`, and says to strike the concurrency box deliberately where no
equivalent exists — a box that cannot be ticked teaches people to skip
checklists.
Refs #18
Bump-Type: minor
The vendored skills were written against a generic `Task()` and an operator
called "your human partner". Neither exists here. An agent following
dispatching-parallel-agents literally would call a tool that is not in its list.
`Task tool` becomes the `Agent` tool with `subagent_type` across all six prompt
templates and the Gemini mapping table, and the dispatch example gains the three
options that actually matter for parallel work: issuing every dispatch in ONE
message (several Agent uses in a single turn run concurrently; one per turn
serialises them), `isolation: "worktree"` so two agents cannot fight over the
same tree, and per-agent `model` override for cheap mechanical fan-out.
`Workflow` is named as the structured alternative — phases, per-finding verify,
fan-in — with its opt-in condition stated, because a skill that told an agent to
reach for it unprompted would be teaching a policy violation.
"your human partner" becomes "the operator" in five skills. Beyond phrasing, it
was factually wrong in executing-plans, which told the reader to *ask* whether
subagents are available; on this fleet Claude Code has them and Crush/Pi/OpenCode
do not, so it now says which skill to use where.
Closes#17
Bump-Type: patch
Both skills gain EARS-lite as an option alongside prose criteria: WHEN/WHILE/IF
plus the unconditional form, for behaviour that a measurable threshold cannot
express. feature-spec also gains a Context snapshot section — the executor of a
spec routinely cannot open the architecture document it points at, so the facts
it depends on get inlined with provenance.
Pressure-tested per #19, and the RED phase argued against half the issue. A
subagent with no skill wrote a strong spec and then explained that it had
deliberately NOT inlined architecture context, "because both are owned by the
existing architecture document and duplicating them here would create two
drifting sources of truth". That objection is correct, so the section is built
around answering it: snapshot what the implementer cannot look up, always cite
source and version, and state that the source wins on disagreement. Prose
criteria came out fine unaided; EARS phrasing did not appear at all, which is
where the real gap was.
The GREEN run then found seven defects in the first draft, all fixed here:
- The example was in the same domain as the test scenario, so it got copied
rather than read — the spec inherited an extraction-confidence requirement
its feature request never mentioned. The example is now deliberately
off-domain, with that failure written up as the reason.
- EARS-lite had no unconditional form, so a genuine invariant ("no instruction
above threshold ever reaches a file") had to be bent into a WHILE that a
system trivially satisfies by never entering the state. Added.
- "Maps 1:1 onto a test" was false for the WHILE form, which is universally
quantified. Softened to say which forms map to one test and which do not.
- The provenance rule had no answer for the case it was written for: an author
who also cannot read the source. Now: mark the block UNVERIFIED in those
words and make confirmation the implementer's first task.
- "Snapshot only what this spec's decisions rest on" was narrower than the
section's own purpose; a table name underpins no decision and still blocks
the migration. Widened, with the omissions stated deliberately.
- "Say so in the section itself" did not say what, at what granularity. Now one
opening line, not a per-fact annotation.
- The template had no slot for EARS lines, so their placement was a guess.
Added as a subsection with a note that they are properties, not checkboxes.
Closes#12
Bump-Type: minor
superpowers-systematic-debugging restated debug's core (hypothesis before fix)
across 296 lines, with a fix-implementation phase that belongs to tdd and a
rationalization table that mostly repeats debug's own Anti-Patterns. Two things
in it were not restatement, and both are now in debug: instrument every
component boundary before hypothesising when a bug spans components, and treat
three failed fixes as evidence the mechanism was never identified rather than
as a reason to try a fourth.
Not deleted with it, contrary to the issue: find-polluter.sh and the three
technique files (root-cause-tracing, defense-in-depth, condition-based-waiting)
are real assets, one of them an actual tool. They move to debug/references/ with
a stated load trigger each, because a reference nobody knows when to open is
dead weight. The pressure-test transcripts and CREATION-LOG from the upstream
fork go; they document obra's process, not ours.
Pressure-tested per #19, and the RED phase refuted the issue's premise. Two
subagents without the skill got the multi-component scenario and the four-failed-
fixes scenario; both already instrumented boundaries unprompted, and the second
refused to write a fifth fix on its own initiative. So these sections are not
correcting a demonstrated gap in this model — they are insurance for weaker
models and for prompts less well-posed than a test scenario. Recorded as such
rather than claimed as a fix.
The GREEN run applied both sections correctly and then found four defects in
them, all fixed here: the boundary rule read as suspending Iron Law 2's 3-5
hypotheses; the trigger said "reduced" when fixes that change nothing are the
stronger signal; "stop proposing a fourth" read as licence to return no
hypotheses at all; and the references had no load triggers. Its remaining
findings are pre-existing and filed as #36.
41 skills. debug 146 -> 188 lines.
Closes#14
Bump-Type: minor
Three similarly-named skills cover orthogonal concerns — what to check
(code-review), how to commission a reviewer (requesting), how to behave when
feedback arrives (receiving) — and none of them mentioned the other two. An
agent landing on one had no way to learn the others existed. One line each,
placed at the core-principle line where a reader is already oriented.
stage-gate-review's gate-prep step now says to run grill-me's Full Grill before
bringing an ask: a council's hard questions are cheaper answered in private, and
a gap found by grilling is one you close rather than one the gate reports.
The bug half: receiving-code-review cited "You're absolutely right!" as an
"explicit CLAUDE.md violation". That is obra's upstream convention leaking
through the vendored copy — `grep -ci "absolutely right" ~/dev/CLAUDE.md` is 0,
and so is AGENT.md. The guidance is right, the citation was inventing authority
it did not have; it now says what it actually is, performative agreement rather
than evaluation.
Closes#16
Bump-Type: patch
Three runs failed with `! [rejected] HEAD -> main (non-fast-forward)`. The
runner is maxParallel=1 and shared with mathias/infra, so those jobs started
five minutes and three commits after their own push. The tagger checked out
its commit and pushed that stale HEAD to main, which main had long left behind.
My own change made it worse: pairing the manifest bump and the tag in a single
`git push` turned a partial failure into a total one, so no tag was created
either. Except once — v0.10.0 landed through the no-bump-needed branch while
the manifest stayed at 0.9.0, which is precisely the "installed hosts never
see the release" state, and which #34's ordering check then caught on main.
The tag now goes up first and alone: it names the commit this run checked out
and cannot be rejected however far main has moved. The bump is a separate
concern that must land on whatever main is NOW, so it re-fetches, rebuilds the
commit on origin/main and retries up to three times, and steps aside entirely
if a later run has already bumped past it.
plugin.json is set to 0.10.0 in this commit so the gate can pass at all — main
was red on manifest-behind-tag, which would have blocked the tag job that fixes
the tagger.
Refs #22
Bump-Type: patch
Second half of #29. The index was hand-maintained and had already drifted
once: dream and experiment-spec shipped with no row, their rows lost to a
squash-merge after a directory reorg. bin/check-index caught that after the
fact; generating removes the class.
The curated summary and trigger move into each SKILL.md as `summary:` and
`use_when:`, carried over verbatim from the existing table rather than derived
from `description:` — description is a paragraph written for model selection,
and truncating it would have produced a worse table than the one it replaced.
Knowledge now lives once, next to the skill it describes, which is the argument
that made a hand-maintained index the wrong shape to begin with.
The table is written between markers, so the wiring docs, the relationships
tree and the trigger table below it are untouched — those are prose, not data.
Rows are alphabetical now; the conceptual grouping the old order carried lives
in the relationships tree, which is the better place for it. A fourth column
shows each skill's surfaces, which is what makes #29's field visible rather
than merely enforced.
bin/check-index and its test are deleted: a generated table cannot drift in
either direction, so `generate-index --check` subsumes both of its assertions.
Verified by mutation — deleting the tdd row turns `task check` red with
"SKILLS_INDEX.md is out of date".
Closes#29
Bump-Type: minor
The repo distributes three ways — the Claude Code plugin, the symlinked
library for Crush/Pi/OpenCode, and claude.ai, which has no fetch path at all —
and treated every skill as belonging to all of them. claude.ai is not a fourth
host to mirror: gitea-ci, playwright and web-shot have no shell and no cluster
there, so a flat mirror installs skills that can never fire and degrades
selection for the ones that can.
Every SKILL.md now carries `surfaces:`, defaulting to [claude-code, library];
dream, own-the-task and grill-me add `chat`, matching what is actually
installed on claude.ai today. Claude Code accepts the extra key —
`claude plugin validate` passes and the skills still load.
bin/check-surfaces validates values, not just presence, because the failure
mode here is silent: a wrong surface removes a skill from a harness rather than
erroring. install.sh links only skills whose surfaces include `library`, and a
source that declares nothing at all is treated as foreign and linked as-is —
Anthropic's official set has no reason to know this convention. doctor's
missing-link check skips non-library skills for the same reason.
Refs #29
Bump-Type: minor
`task check` asserted plugin.json's version EQUALS the latest tag. `git
describe` is local-only, so any checkout that had not fetched the tag CI just
pushed went red on a commit that was correct — three times in one backlog
session, on the loop push → CI tags and pushes the bump → pull → red until you
also fetch tags.
The fault the assertion exists for is the manifest failing to move: a release
whose manifest still names the old version, so no installed host ever sees the
update. That is manifest < tag. Ahead is normal and is now quiet.
Ordering needed a real comparison, and bin/doctor had already grown one for
#30, so it moves to bin/newer-version with its own tests rather than existing
twice. Seven cases including the lexical trap (0.8.10 beats 0.8.9) and a
missing component counting as zero.
Verified by mutation: manifest 0.1.0 against tag v0.9.0 exits 201 naming both
versions; manifest 9.9.9 exits 0; the real tree exits 0.
Closes#34
Bump-Type: patch
~/.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
Verified duplicate rather than assumed one. Section for section it is the same
skill as `tdd` — Overview, When to Use, Iron Law, Red-Green-Refactor with the
same dot graph, Good Tests, Common Rationalizations, Red Flags, Verification
Checklist, When Stuck, Final Rule — with TypeScript examples and obra's "your
human partner" phrasing instead of ours. `tdd` carries all of it plus the
Go-specific material (table-driven tests, t.Run, testify, go test -race), the
brain MCP integration and the Mode 2 routing note.
Its one non-SKILL.md file, testing-anti-patterns.md, is byte-identical to
skills/tdd/references/testing-anti-patterns.md, which `tdd` already points at.
Nothing was salvageable because nothing was different.
No references anywhere outside its own directory except the index row, removed
here. `atdd` is untouched — acceptance-level is a genuinely different altitude
and it already cross-refs `tdd` correctly.
Incidentally the first live catch by bin/check-index (#15): deleting the
directory turned `task check` red with "SKILLS_INDEX.md lists
'superpowers-test-driven-development', which has no ...SKILL.md" before I got
to the row.
42 skills now. Closes#13
Bump-Type: patch
Missed in 83b069a. #15 asked for three things and the table row was only two
of them: experiment-spec also belongs in the Skill Relationships tree, parallel
to feature-spec and downstream of spec-driven-dev, since it is the research/ML
substitute for feature-spec rather than a separate lifecycle.
dream needs no edge, same as trainer and session-retrospective — the issue said
so and that part was right.
Refs #15
Bump-Type: patch
The usage block pointed at ~/dev/.skills/web-shot/shot.sh four times. That
directory has not existed since the skills moved into this repo, and the
failure mode is worse than a broken link: web-shot exists for agents with no
local browser, so a 404 sends them to hand-roll the Job instead of looking
harder. One caller burned three attempts on playwright module resolution
before finding the script that documents that exact gotcha.
Replaced with a resolution line covering both delivery paths — the Claude Code
plugin and the ~/.agents/skills symlink — so no absolute checkout path is left
to rot. Verified on koala: resolves to the .agents link, and degrades to an
empty string plus a clear message where the skill is not installed.
The brain entry headless-browser-via-k3s-playwright-job carried the same stale
path in three places and referenced the retired wire-skills.sh wiring; updated
to match.
Closes#26
Bump-Type: patch
Both skills shipped without an index row. The rows existed — on the feature
branches deleted in #22 — and were dropped by the squash-merge that followed
a directory reorg: the SKILL.md landed under skills/, the row did not. Nothing
errored, the index just under-reported the library to every harness reading it.
Adding two rows by hand fixes today and not tomorrow, so the assertion goes in
`task check` via bin/check-index, following the same pattern as
bin/should-skip-release: a real script with a real test, not untested logic
buried in a Taskfile. It checks both directions — a skill with no row, and a
row naming a skill that no longer exists.
Verified by mutation: deleting the `dream` row turns `task check` red and the
report names it.
Closes#15
Bump-Type: patch
`env -u VAR cmd` and `env FOO=bar cmd` exec a command with a modified
environment and print nothing themselves. The old rule matched any `env`
token followed anywhere later by a pipe into a filter, so it blocked the
documented 1Password write path and forced a `(unset VAR; cmd)` workaround.
False positives only — never a leak — but a guard people route around is a
guard on its way out.
The rule now denies only when everything after `env` is exhausted by options
and VAR=value assignments. That is strictly the dumping shape, and it also
closes a hole the two previous rules left open: `env FOO=bar` with no command
word prints the whole environment and was allowed.
Three new deny/allow pairs pin it, including the 1Password write shape that
motivated the report. 20 cases now, up from 14, all passing.
Closes#25
Bump-Type: patch
The repo had a `task check` structure gate and a 28-case shell test suite
that nothing ever ran. The only workflow auto-tagged every push to main, so
CI reported green having tested nothing — a gate that fails open, and the
reason `mathias/skills` shows up as repository-blocked in the estate backlog
classification.
release.yml becomes ci.yml with two jobs: `gate` runs check + test on every
push and PR; `tag` keeps the existing semver-from-trailer logic but declares
`needs: gate`, so a red check cannot ship a tag. The pull_request trigger
also gives `tbd_ship` a CI run to read on a branch head — without one it
fails closed and never merges (#22).
The tagger now pushes the manifest bump commit and the tag in a single
`git push`. Two pushes left a window where the gate ran `task check` on the
bump commit before the tag existed, and the manifest/tag parity assertion
would fail on a commit that was in fact correct.
tests/ci_gate_test.sh pins the wiring: PR trigger present, both tasks run,
tag needs gate, no second ungated workflow file.
Refs: #22
Bump-Type: minor
Wraps mathias/cad#14's `cad stuck` query surface: five-phase diagnostic
order (re-derive the worklist, read issue comments FIRST, then Actions job
logs, separate infrastructure fault from task outcome, decide-or-say
DECISION-NEEDED), read-only by Iron Law — no dispatch, no label writes, no
issue close. Every diagnosis cites a locator; every operator-only call
surfaces as a structured DECISION NEEDED block instead of being decided for
them.
Built after cad#14 passed its live-estate acceptance test (7 real findings,
locators verified) — the skill is the ritual around a query already proven
to produce actionable rows, not a checklist with no input.
Bump-Type: minor
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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
This skill is the third factory. Two repo templates were fixed when the
buildah->buildctl migration went through, and this one kept handing out
the broken step for weeks afterwards -- because it is what gets consulted
when adding CI to an EXISTING repo, which the templates never touch.
Pasting an implementation is the actual defect. The estate now has one
(mathias/infra ci-templates/build-image.sh) with byte-identical copies
held in place by a drift gate, so the skill teaches the four adoption
steps and the input list instead of a block to copy.
Step 1 of those four -- registering in adopters.txt -- is called out
explicitly, because a copy nobody registered works today and falls
silently behind on the next canonical change. That is the failure this
whole issue exists to end.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011PL5XcG68SvQqz3vGVbWbf
This skill was the source of the buildah build step that infra#241 has
spent a sprint removing from nine repos: rootless buildah cannot run in
the containerized gitea-runner (drop ALL capabilities,
allowPrivilegeEscalation false, no OCI runtime), and the failure is
latent -- warm base-image layers hide it until the first cold pull.
Two templates were migrated for exactly this reason (stop new repos
inheriting the trap); this skill is the third factory and was still
handing out the broken pattern.
Also drops the `sudo k3s ctr` smoke test it recommended: written for the
Arch host runner, impossible in a pod (`sudo: command not found`). The
deploy job's rollout verification covers the same ground.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_011PL5XcG68SvQqz3vGVbWbf
Replaces the raw NodePort URLs with Tailscale Serve endpoints on koala:
brain https://koala.tail30472e.ts.net:8443/mcp -> 127.0.0.1:30330
infra https://koala.tail30472e.ts.net:8444/mcp -> 127.0.0.1:30342
Why this beats both alternatives that were tried:
The public d-ma.be path exits to Cloudflare and NPM to reach a k3s service on
the machine the session is running on, and Cloudflare rate-limits and
size-caps tool results — the original complaint. The raw NodePort path fixed
that but only worked from koala: every namespace carries default-deny-ingress
and an allow policy naming the traefik namespace, so kube-proxy's
KUBE-EXTERNAL-SERVICES chain RSTs external callers. Admitting tailnet clients
there would need externalTrafficPolicy: Local on each service plus an ipBlock
per policy, because the default Cluster policy SNATs the source and an ipBlock
can never match.
Serve sidesteps all of it. tailscaled terminates TLS with a genuine cert and
proxies over loopback, so the request reaches the NodePort from koala itself —
the case the NetworkPolicy already permits. No policy change, no
externalTrafficPolicy change, no firewall rule, no cert-manager, no DNS record.
Port-per-service rather than path-per-service: the mapping is 1:1 with no
prefix rewriting, so what the client requests and what the server sees cannot
desync.
Verified: 200 authenticated in 7.6ms from koala, and `claude mcp list` reports
Connected against the Serve URL. An earlier apparent OAuth resource-metadata
mismatch turned out to be an artifact of testing without an Authorization
header — with a valid bearer the client never enters OAuth discovery.
Client requirement: `tailscale set --accept-dns=true`. Confirmed on iguana that
100.100.100.100 resolves the MagicDNS name correctly while the system resolver
does not, so the name fails to resolve until Tailscale is accepted as a DNS
provider. Tracked in #24 as the Mac prerequisite. Note Serve matches on SNI, so
substituting the raw tailnet IP is not a workaround.
Bump-Type: minor
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
Every MCP call from Claude Code was going out through claude.ai's connector
infrastructure, across the public internet, through Cloudflare and NPM on
piguard, back into koala's k3s ingress — to reach a service on the same
machine the session is running on. For brain that means a two-cloud round trip
to read /var/lib/supervisor/brain, a file on koala's local disk.
Cloudflare rate-limits and size-caps tool results on that path, which is the
actual user-facing symptom. Measured from koala:
brain koala:30330 200 in 6.8ms
infra koala:30342 200 in 3.6ms
brain public edge 200 in 27.7ms
infra starts working again as a side effect: its only fault was an SNI/cert
gap at the public edge (TLS "unrecognized name"), which the NodePort path does
not traverse. No NPM change needed for local use.
Note this is not a relocation of existing config. The mcpServers block that
lived in ~/.claude/settings.json was inert — Claude Code reads server
definitions from ~/.claude.json, project .mcp.json, plugins and connectors,
not from settings.json. Verified: a uniquely-named server placed there is
invisible to both `claude mcp list` and `claude mcp get`. So before the plugin
existed, koala had no direct path at all and every call went via Cloudflare by
construction. That also explains how a stale GITEA_MCP_TOKEN went unnoticed
for five days: nothing consumed it.
Safe to land now because koala is the only host with the plugin installed
(#24). The koala firewall must allow 30330/30342 on the Tailscale interface —
NOT on the LAN broadly, so tailnet membership stays the perimeter — before the
Macs get the plugin. Tracked as a prerequisite in #24. Measured today: those
ports are refused from iguana over both LAN and tailnet while :22 answers, so
the rule does not exist yet.
Bump-Type: minor
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
Every gitea__* call from Claude Code on koala already resolves through the
claude.ai connector, not through this env-var-authenticated HTTP server. The
entry was a second path to the same service that nothing actually used.
That redundancy is exactly why it rotted unnoticed. GITEA_MCP_TOKEN on koala
resolves ~/.op-env -> op://HomeLab/GITEA_MCP_TOKEN, an item orphaned by the
2026-07-30 consolidation that moved gitea-mcp, agentsquad-serve and
crush-runner onto a single shared item in the AgentSecrets vault. The host
env-file was never migrated and cannot be: koala's 1Password service account
has no access to AgentSecrets, while onepassword-connect in-cluster maps both
vaults. So the host copy diverged and stayed diverged for five days.
The cluster was never affected — zero 401s from the pod CIDR in 30 days, every
rejection came from the gateway. Deleting the divergent copy beats maintaining
a second source of truth for a token this host does not need.
brain stays: it authenticates, and it is genuinely used from the plugin.
infra stays but is currently unreachable for an unrelated reason —
infra-mcp.d-ma.be fails TLS with "unrecognized name", an SNI/cert gap at the
NPM edge, tracked separately.
Bump-Type: patch
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
The tagger searched the entire commit message for a bracketed marker as a
substring. The commit that introduced the manifest-bump step described that
marker in its own body — so the tagger read its own documentation as an
instruction and skipped the release. Run 15 reported success with no tag, no
manifest bump and no error. Same failure family as everything else in this
sweep: the wrong thing happened silently.
The rule is now a git trailer matched anchored to its own line, consistent
with Bump-Type, and it lives in bin/should-skip-release rather than untested
inside YAML. tests/release_skip_test.sh pins six cases, including the exact
regression: a message that spells the marker out in prose must still tag.
A marker you cannot mention without triggering is a footgun, not a mechanism.
Bump-Type: patch
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
CI now writes the computed semver into .claude-plugin/plugin.json before
tagging, committed with [skip-release] so it does not re-trigger the tagger.
Claude Code gates plugin updates on that field: without the bump, installed
hosts never see a new tag no matter how many releases go out. `task check`
enforces manifest/tag equality so the two cannot silently diverge.
Docs rewritten around the two delivery paths, and the checkout location is now
stated as load-bearing rather than incidental: SKILLS_CHECKOUT_DIR defaults to
~/.local/share/skills because that is host-local and outside any synced
directory. The previous docs told you to clone into ~/dev, which on this fleet
is an iCloud folder shared by two Macs spanning two path roots — a git working
tree with concurrent writers, and absolute links that are broken on one side by
construction. That advice is what #23 is about; it is now inverted with the
reason attached.
Antigravity and Vibe removed from the docs along with their targets.
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
The plugin now carries the two hooks Mathias owns and the brain/gitea/infra
MCP server definitions, not just skills.
Why this matters more than tidiness: both hooks existed ONLY in koala's
~/.claude/, which is host-local and unsynced. flamingo and iguana have been
running with no secret-guard at all — that is the control which blocks the
decrypt-and-print shape behind the 2026-08-05 ntfy-token leak, the op-item-get
shape behind 2026-07-30, and the base64-bypass shape behind 2026-06-11. Its
absence on two of three machines is a security gap, not a config gap. Shipping
it in the plugin means installing the plugin installs the guard.
.mcp.json references tokens as ${BRAIN_MCP_TOKEN} / ${GITEA_MCP_TOKEN} only —
env indirection, never literal values, so the manifest is safe to commit.
tests/secret_guard_test.sh pins 14 cases. It asserts on
hookSpecificOutput.permissionDecision, NOT exit status: the guard always exits
0 by contract, so an exit-status assertion would pass vacuously while the guard
silently allowed everything. Each deny case names the incident that produced it.
gsd-* hooks are deliberately NOT migrated — GSD owns and updates those in place.
Bump-Type: minor
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
Skills move to skills/<name>/SKILL.md and the repo gains both manifests, so
it is now a marketplace hosting exactly one plugin whose root is the repo
root (source: "."). Claude Code installs it from git; no symlinks involved.
Why: install.sh wired the library into every consuming repo as an ABSOLUTE
symlink to $CHECKOUT_DIR. The checkout moved three times, most recently when
local-dev@1966d5a dropped the embedded .skills/ copy, and nothing migrated
the links — 243 dangling links across 12 repos, hidden from git by the
**/.claude/skills/ ignore rule. Worse, ~/dev spans two path roots
(/Users/mathias on the iCloud-shared Macs, /home/mathias on koala), so an
absolute link stored there is broken on one side by construction. Re-running
the installer cannot fix that; only removing the mechanism can.
install.sh keeps the harnesses with no plugin system and drops from 42 links
per harness to one directory link, via the convergent ~/.agents/skills
convention that Pi and OpenCode both read:
~/.agents/skills -> $CHECKOUT_DIR/skills
~/.config/crush/skills -> ~/.agents/skills
~/.config/opencode/skills -> ~/.agents/skills
wire_claude_repo is deleted outright rather than gated behind a flag — on a
mixed-root fleet it cannot be made correct. Antigravity and Vibe targets go
too; both unused. CHECKOUT_DIR keeps its host-local default deliberately:
pointing it into ~/dev would put a git working tree inside iCloud with two
concurrent writers.
Taskfile drops five near-identical wiring loops (they had already drifted)
and delegates to install.sh. `task check` gains frontmatter validation, a
stray-root-entry gate, and manifest/tag version parity — the loose
secret-hygiene.md sat unloadable for months because nothing checked layout.
Verified: claude plugin validate . passes clean; a probe skill loaded as
skills:zzprobe through --plugin-dir; task check green at 42 skills.
Refs: #23
Bump-Type: minor
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
Was a loose secret-hygiene.md at the root of ~/.claude/skills — not
dir/SKILL.md, so no harness ever loaded it. Promoted to a real skill so
it installs to Claude Code, Crush, Antigravity and Vibe alike.
Frontmatter description carries load-before triggers (kubectl exec/env,
whole-file SOPS decrypt, token rotation) so it fires ahead of the command
that would leak, not after.
Bump-Type: minor
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01BeAp5LTscnz2W7Ubt4eJ6m
set -euo pipefail + `... | grep -iE '^Bump-Type:' | head -1 | awk ...`
inside `bump=$(...)`: when the last commit has no Bump-Type footer (the
normal default-to-patch case), grep exits 1 on no-match. Under
pipefail, that propagates as the whole pipeline's exit status even
though head/awk both succeed -- set -e then kills the script before it
ever reaches the case statement. Broke on every push since 2026-06-22
once a footer-less commit landed after the last one that happened to
carry a Bump-Type line. Appended `|| true` to swallow the expected
no-match case.
Verified this session: `task install` (and its sub-targets) wipe/skip the
per-skill symlinks (0/40 across all harnesses), while install.sh wires 40/40
reliably. Point the wiring docs at install.sh until the Taskfile bug is fixed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The index still described local-dev's old wire-skills.sh / ~/dev/.skills
mechanism. This repo is now the canonical home; wiring is `task install`
(claude global+repo, crush, antigravity, vibe) or the curl|bash install.sh.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ports the Vibe wiring from local-dev's wire-skills.sh so this repo's installer
covers all four harnesses. Vibe uses a flat layout — ~/.vibe/skills/<name>.md
symlinked to the skill's SKILL.md file (not the directory, unlike Claude/Crush/
Antigravity). Added to both `task install` and install.sh, idempotent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Consolidating the divergence between this repo and local-dev's embedded
~/dev/.skills/ (the two had drifted; the 19 overlapping skills were byte-identical).
- Import the 17 skills that existed only in local-dev: discovery-framing,
stage-gate-review, web-shot, and the 14 superpowers-* skills. This repo is now
the superset / single source of truth.
- SKILLS_INDEX.md: add rows for the 17.
- install.sh + Taskfile.yml: git.d-ma.be host (was stale gitea.d-ma.be, which
broke the one-line curl|bash installer post-rename).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The two new skills shipped without the name/description frontmatter every
other skill carries, so harnesses surfaced them as a bare directory name
with no description to match against intent. Add frontmatter (body unchanged).
Bump-Type: patch
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The koala act_runner has labels [self-hosted, linux, amd64]. The
default ubuntu-latest label doesn't match, so the release workflow
silently produced zero runs on every push. Matches the convention
used by hyperguild + infra workflows.
Runner is offline at time of this commit — bring it up on koala via
the act_runner systemd unit before expecting tags to appear.
[skip-release]
Phase 2 of mathias/skills extraction. Adds two new per-tool wirers
alongside Claude Code:
- Crush — ~/.config/crush/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (charmbracelet/crush,
successor to opencode-ai/opencode which is archived)
- Antigravity — ~/.gemini/antigravity/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (Google
VS Code extension). Our SKILL.md frontmatter (name + description)
is already in the format Antigravity expects — no manifest
translation step needed.
Both wirers added to Taskfile.yml (install:crush + install:antigravity)
and install.sh (wire_crush + wire_antigravity). The aggregate `install`
target now calls all four targets (claude:global, claude:repo, crush,
antigravity). Idempotent symlinks, same shape as the Claude Code wirer.
Per-host env overrides documented in README: SKILLS_REF for tag pinning,
CRUSH_SKILLS_DIR + ANTIGRAVITY_SKILLS_DIR for non-default paths.
Skipped:
- opencode (opencode-ai/opencode): archived, succeeded by Crush; its
Custom Commands surface is user prompt templates, not system skills
- gitea-resident agents: consume via per-repo .claude/skills or brain
MCP, no special target needed
Bump-Type: minor
Phase 1 of mathias/skills extraction (infra#62 Track D — homelab
next-step plan addendum). Imports ~/dev/.skills/ verbatim (19 skill
dirs + SKILLS_INDEX.md) and adds the installation surface:
- Taskfile.yml — install / update / list / release / check targets
- install.sh — bootstrap installer for hosts without Task. Idempotent
symlink wirer; default checkout at ~/.local/share/skills/ on every
host; SKILLS_REF env var pins a tag (default: main).
- .gitea/workflows/release.yml — auto-tag every push to main by
Bump-Type footer (major/minor/patch, default patch). Skipped when
commit contains [skip-release].
- README — usage, versioning, contribution flow, secret-hygiene rule.
Phase 1 wires Claude Code only (~/.claude/skills/<name> global +
<repo>/.claude/skills/<name> per-repo). Phase 2 adds Crush, opencode,
antigravity, and gitea-resident agents (cobalt-dingo, agentsquad)
once their skill conventions are researched.
Public repo, markdown-only — no secrets, no client names. Verified
via pre-push grep before initial push.
[skip-release]
mathias
