Commit Graph
8 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 42c24de6a9 feat(skills): always_inject belongs beside the skill, not in one database
deploy / test (push) Successful in 5m14s
deploy / build (push) Successful in 5m30s
Migration 0083 added the column for a measured failure — under the `index`
arm, `workspace-repo-commit-protocol` scored Trigger=FAIL while its boundary
check passed, because a rule that applies to everyone who writes reads to each
agent as nobody's in particular. The column shipped and was never set: prod ran
0 of 53 skills flagged, and the post-v0.8.5 validation mission made 76 tool
calls with ZERO ReadMcpResourceTool among them. Not plumbing — the door
answered 200 from inside that container, and the agents used ToolSearch four
times to reach for other tools they did not have.

Setting it by hand fixes one database. A rebuilt one comes up un-flagged, with
nothing in the repo recording that the skill was ever meant to be injected —
the same shape as every silent-success defect in this project.

So the frontmatter carries it, the loader parses it, and the upsert writes it.
The file wins on conflict: builtins are code-managed, and a setting that exists
only in one database is a setting nobody can find.

Guarded both ways. `always_inject` defaults FALSE, because defaulting true
would quietly abolish the index arm rather than fix it; and a test asserts the
shipped skill still carries the flag, verified by flipping it to false and
watching the test fail.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WZb5A2kfVfjpdwSochkuHz
2026-09-07 04:19:52 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 d0b657a24b fix(skills): two more skills that contradicted the platform
Same class as the `/workspace/repo` path and the ZeroClaw tool names: the
skills were written alongside the platform and never compared to it again.
Both found by reading the source of truth before writing a check against
it.

1. `decompose-int-items` showed `PLAN_COMPLETE: INT-01..05`. An id is
   strictly `INT-<digits>`, so the range form is rejected outright — the
   plan pass records nothing while every item stays open. A live planner
   emitted exactly that line. Now one id per line.

2. `workspace-repo-commit-protocol` said the task-card parser advances
   mission state on the INT id in the commit subject. Nothing in the
   platform reads commit messages; the parser reads `run_events` — the
   agent's turn output. An agent that believed it could commit with the id
   and never emit `COMPLETED: INT-NN`, leaving the mission open on an item
   it had finished. The convention is kept, the mechanism corrected.

`no_skill_shows_a_marker_the_parser_would_reject` runs the real parser
over every marker in every skill's fenced blocks, negative-controlled
against the range form.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018i9Ten1LU4jUr5d7TAWda9
2026-08-21 08:24:01 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 771092b165 fix(skills): a pinned skill contradicted the platform inside the same prompt
Extending the Skill-Use mechanical checks, per the baseline's own next step,
found something bigger than a missing check.

THE DEFECT

`workspace-repo-commit-protocol` told agents that `/workspace/repo` was "the
ONLY path where source-modifying edits belong". The platform mounts and
advertises `/mission/repo` — 26 references in the code; `/workspace/repo`
appears in none of them.

The skill is bound on 29 role bindings and was delivered TWICE in the run
already measured, so an agent received the real path in its tool preamble
and a skill contradicting it a few hundred tokens later, in one prompt. An
agent that obeyed the skill wrote source into a directory nothing collects
— the phase then delivers nothing, and looks like an agent that did no work.

The same skill instructed `file_read` / `file_write` / `shell`: ZeroClaw's
names, the exact ones `phase_task_text` was fixed to stop advertising after
five agents on a single mission spent 7.4k tokens describing the mismatch
instead of working. The prompt was corrected and the skill kept saying it.

Rewritten against what the code actually does, including the repo-less case
(`/mission/repo` exists, is collected as artifacts, has nothing to push).

THE CLASS, AND THE GUARD

The skills were never checked against the platform they describe. Nothing
compared them, so a skill could contradict the prompt it ships inside and
stay that way indefinitely — the same shape as PLAN_COMPLETE being
documented and never implemented.

Two tests in `skills_loader::contradiction_tests` now hold it: no skill may
name a repo path the platform does not mount, and none may instruct a tool
the agent's subprocess does not expose. The second matches backticked
instructions and skips corrective lines, so a skill may still WARN against
the wrong names — as this one now does. Both negative-controlled by
restoring the old wording.

AND THE CHECK THAT STARTED IT

`workspace-repo-commit-protocol` now has a Boundary check: writing outside
`/mission/repo` fails, and the message names the consequence — a phase that
delivers nothing — rather than just the wrong path.

docs/SKILL-USE-BASELINE.md records this as the fourth defect the
measurement found, and corrects the "next unit of work" note now that this
one is done.

Full workspace suite green: 106 binaries, zero build errors.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-19 12:51:43 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 4358964c05 fix(skills): every team-template skill binding now resolves
55 of 85 role skill bindings pointed at skills that were never authored,
so 10 of 11 team templates bound a smaller context bundle than their role
prompts assumed. Three roles bound nothing at all (gpu.bench_engineer,
threejs.shader_author, threejs.perf_engineer) while their prompts described
procedures they had no way to read.

The loader comment at team_template_loader.rs:167 already diagnosed this —
snake_case slugs in TOML against kebab-case skill files — and it was
half-fixed: the kebab names were corrected, the snake_case ones left.

It was invisible because both existing tests assert authored ⊆ referenced
(30/30, green) and the second explicitly declines to check the other
direction. So the failing half was the half nobody asserted.

Resolved every name by one of three explicit choices:

  - 23 skills authored where the role genuinely needed the procedure
    (gpu, threejs, research, analysis, frontend, mobile, backend, platform)
  - renames onto authored skills where one existed in substance, including
    the four-near-duplicate cases that collapse onto one real skill
  - 22 aspirational references deleted — a binding an agent cannot read is
    a promise, not a capability

Two tests now hold it. The unit test checks referenced ⊆ authored against
the files. The new integration test runs both loaders in boot order and
asserts the bindings survive the trip through the database, which is a
different question: resolution goes through skills_catalog rows, so a skill
file that exists but fails to ingest still leaves the role empty.

Negative controls: the unit test failed naming all 55; the integration test
fails naming the exact role when one name is reverted.

threejs.shader_author and .perf_engineer gained a second and third skill
after the collapse — pin_in_context pins idx < 2, so a role left with one
skill silently pins less than the policy intends.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-19 07:42:48 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 f4adc8d0f9 fix(podcast): stop reading identifiers aloud, and pitch the episode at a teenager
deploy / test (push) Successful in 4m11s
deploy / build (push) Successful in 5m28s
Two things the operator found by listening to a real episode.

**1. Identifiers were spoken as digit soup.** The script genuinely said
"arxiv 2608.12888", which the voice reads as "two six zero eight point one two
eight eight eight". Same for three-decimal values: "0.506" and "0.004" became
long strings of spoken digits. A listener on a treadmill cannot write an
identifier down and does not need a third decimal place.

`speakable()` strips arXiv references and bare identifier-shaped numbers, and
rounds decimals to two places — with a carve-out that matters: 0.004 rounds to
0.00, which would claim the value was ZERO when the whole point was that it
collapsed to nearly nothing, so it says "under 0.01" instead.

Deliberately narrow: it removes identifiers and shortens over-precise decimals,
and does not paraphrase, reorder or summarise. The agents' words are still the
episode. It also preserves the sentence's full stop — swallowing it turned
"…financial retrieval, arxiv 2608.00183. This one's a catch." into one run-on
sentence, and the pause is how a listener knows a thought ended.

Note that `podcast-dialogue-writing.md` ALREADY said "no arXiv ids" and the
writer included them anyway. That is this project's recurring lesson restated:
an instruction is a request, and a listener deserves a guarantee. The prose asks
and the code enforces.

**2. It was written for someone who already knew the field.** The skill and the
script phase's task now target a bright sixteen-year-old: define an acronym in
the sentence that first uses it, describe the mechanism rather than naming it
("a road map with motorways and side streets" instead of "a hierarchical
navigable small world graph"), one idea per sentence. The test offered is
whether the listener could explain the finding to a friend afterwards.

That is not dumbing down — it is the constraint that forces a writer to say what
a thing actually does rather than what it is called.

Tested against the exact lines from the episode that was listened to.
366 tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-18 10:42:48 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 5 a2d7e3ea92 feat(skills): author the Continuous Research skills, and make its roles honest
deploy / test (push) Successful in 4m4s
deploy / build (push) Successful in 1m45s
The boot log has said `continuous_research — 4 role skills bound, 8 unresolved`
on every start. Those eight roles ran without the instructions their template
promised them, silently: `skills_loader` reports the miss and carries on.

Worse than the missing files was what the prompts described. v1 told the
harvester to sweep "RSS feeds, GitHub trending, HN front page, YouTube /
podcast RSS" — none of which exist. `harvest.rs` searches arXiv and nothing
else. A role prompt describing a machine that was never built is the failure
this codebase keeps paying for, so v2 describes the machine that exists.

Roles now match the pipeline: paper_reader (the harvest already ran; read the
manifest and the papers), signal_ranker (unchanged in spirit), script_writer
(the podcast half, which had no role at all).

Seven skills authored under skills/research/, kebab-case to match the loader —
team_template_loader.rs:177-181 documents the snake_case/kebab-case trap that
already unbinds skills elsewhere:

  arxiv-daily                  what the harvest guarantees, so an agent does
                               NOT re-search arXiv and corrupt the seen-set
  paper-to-project-relevance   name a file or roadmap item, or say "no bearing"
  duplicate-detection          the seen-set catches identity; this catches the
                               same work under a different id
  signal-to-noise-ranking      novelty/relevance/depth, and the two biases to
                               resist (recency up, inconvenience down)
  executive-summary-writing    what it is / why it matters / what to do — decide,
                               do not hedge
  obsidian-vault-conventions   the vault is a human's live workspace; never
                               main, never reorganise, hash the body not the file
  podcast-dialogue-writing     write for someone on a treadmill; the 10-70 char
                               highlight bound is the API's, not a style rule

`web_fetch` dropped from mcp_bundles: runtime_provision.rs binds every mission
claw to `["clawmates_door"]` and never reads that field, so declaring it
instructed roles to use a tool that never arrived. The prompts say `curl` via
Bash, which is what they actually have.

Boot now reports `continuous_research — 11 role skills bound`, with no
unresolved clause. 344 tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
2026-08-17 14:44:03 -07:00
Omar Sobh 4c32799906 skills: quote cargo-audit-workflow description containing backtick
YAML choked on the leading backtick in the description value (line 2
column 14 — the `cargo-audit` inline-code span). Quoting the whole
string makes it a scalar, not a tag/anchor. Surfaced by prod server
logs after today's compose refresh.
2026-07-20 04:19:16 -07:00
Omar SobhandClaude Opus 4.7 7b23f61632 slice 3.5c: seed 15 built-in skills across the 6 stacks
ci / frontend (push) Successful in 25s
ci / gates (push) Successful in 4s
ci / rust (push) Failing after 3m41s
ci / e2e (push) Skipped
ci / publish (push) Skipped
Hand-authored skill catalog anchored to real 2026-07 versions:
  - Rust 1.97.1 (stable), edition 2024
  - React 19.2.7, Server Components + Actions
  - TailwindCSS 4.3.3 (CSS-first config, Oxide engine)
  - three.js r185 (WebGPURenderer stable, BatchedMesh matured)
  - React Native 0.86 / Expo SDK 54+ (New Architecture default)
  - cargo-nextest 0.9.140, gitleaks 8.20+, cargo-audit 0.21+
  - Postgres 17 (18 in beta, don't rely on)
  - CUDA Blackwell, Metal Apple7+, ROCm CDNA3

Ships 15 skills across the categories:
  foundation/  workspace-repo-commit-protocol
               small-focused-commits
               tdd-red-green-refactor
               code-review-checklist
               int-xx-marker-protocol
               decompose-int-items
  rust/        write-rust-current-edition
               rust-error-handling
               cargo-test-driven-development
               rust-async-tokio-idioms
  backend/     postgres-migrations-forward-only
               postgres-index-selection
               api-pagination-day-1
  frontend/    react-19-server-components
               tailwind-v4-idioms
               component-4-state-model
  mobile/      expo-managed-vs-bare
               rn-flashlist-perf
  gpu/         gpu-coalescing-and-occupancy
               roofline-model
  threejs/     threejs-perf-and-teardown
  security/    cargo-audit-workflow
               secret-scanning-gitleaks

skills_loader.rs walks skills/**/*.md, parses YAML frontmatter
(name, description, when_to_use, tags), upserts via
skills_catalog::upsert_builtin. Idempotent per boot — bumps version
+ appends skill_versions row ONLY when body changes. Deterministic
sha256-derived ids so builtins are stable across boots.

Dockerfile copies skills/ to /etc/clawmates/skills. Server boot
task spawns loader alongside team_template_loader.

Follow-ups (Slice 3.5c continuation, future PRs):
  - 20-30 more skills (duckdb, shadcn composition, a11y, WebGPU
    migration, metal frame capture, rocprof, deep gitea forge
    integration, semgrep rulepacks)
  - Bind skills to team template roles (add [role.skills] refs to
    templates/teams/*.toml + wire template_role_skills population
    in team_template_loader)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <[email protected]>
2026-07-19 13:55:44 -07:00