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Correct the stale destination context in the find-inspiration skill - #50

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nonrational merged 1 commit into
mainfrom
skill-destination-context
Aug 23, 2026
Merged

Correct the stale destination context in the find-inspiration skill#50
nonrational merged 1 commit into
mainfrom
skill-destination-context

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Problem

find-inspiration's "Destination context (this repo — known; don't re-derive)" section described a repo that no longer exists. It named link-dotfiles.sh and a Makefile deploy that manifest + deploy.sh replaced, called CI "a smoke test, not real tests" when test_deploy.sh and test_shell.sh have since landed, and told a leaf steal to translate into "root dotfile + make link-*" when sources now live under home/ with a manifest row.

Three more errors turned up while checking it:

  • The documented invocation path ~/.claude/skills/find-inspiration/bin/triage-issues.py does not resolve on every machine — it depends on which checkout is deployed. It does not resolve on this one.
  • "This repo pins no python" is false. .tool-versions pins python. The shebang choice is still correct, for the opposite reason: it avoids depending on that pinned version being installed.
  • The decision log's location was justified by link-dotfiles.sh symlinking a repo-root dotdir into $HOME — a mechanism that no longer exists.

Motivation

That section is explicitly labelled "don't re-derive", so it is the one part of the skill a run is told to trust without checking. Every error in it propagates straight into filed issues, which then describe a repo state that was never true.

This is not hypothetical. The section survived the manifest-deploy migration, the test suite landing, and the home/ restructure without being updated, and the three runs behind #49 had to re-derive the whole thing from scratch to avoid inheriting it.

Proposed Solution

Rewrites the section against origin/main and adds what is now the largest part of this repo and was entirely absent: agent config, home/.agents as source of truth, the harness shims, the guard targets, and the vendored submodule.

Fixes the three errors above, and swaps the hardcoded ~/.claude/skills/... invocations for the skill's own directory so the path holds regardless of which checkout is deployed.

Also adds the instruction whose absence cost a run: verify line numbers, counts and whether a target exists against origin/main, not the working tree, which in this repo usually has a feature branch checked out. The section heading changes from "known; don't re-derive" to "shape is stable; verify specifics" to match — the structural facts are safe to trust, the specifics are not.

Feedback

The heading change is the judgement call worth reviewing. "Don't re-derive" existed to stop each run burning effort rediscovering the same repo. Loosening it to "verify specifics" trades some of that saving for accuracy. I think the trade is right, since the cost of a wrong specific is a filed issue describing a state that never existed, but it does make each run slightly more expensive.

Runtimes are described without listing them. .tool-versions gained three entries since the section was written, so naming them again just sets up the next staleness. The section now points at the file instead. Say if you would rather have the concrete list.

Independent of #49, which only touches decisions.jsonl and runs/.

The skill described a repo that no longer exists. It named link-dotfiles.sh
and a Makefile deploy that manifest + deploy.sh replaced, called CI "a smoke
test, not real tests" when test_deploy.sh and test_shell.sh have since landed,
and told a leaf steal to translate into "root dotfile + make link-*" when
sources now live under home/ with a manifest row.

Three further corrections found while checking it:

- The documented invocation path ~/.claude/skills/find-inspiration/... does
  not resolve on every machine; it depends on which checkout is deployed.
  Use the skill's own directory instead.
- "This repo pins no python" is false; .tool-versions pins python. The
  shebang is still right, for the opposite reason: it avoids depending on
  that pinned version being installed.
- The log's location was justified by link-dotfiles.sh symlinking a repo-root
  dotdir into $HOME. Rewritten to the reason that actually holds.

Also adds the instruction that cost a run: verify line numbers, counts and
target existence against origin/main, not the working tree, which usually
has a feature branch checked out.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@nonreagent
nonreagent requested a review from nonrational August 23, 2026 14:48
@nonrational
nonrational merged commit d6fe010 into main Aug 23, 2026
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@nonrational
nonrational deleted the skill-destination-context branch August 23, 2026 15:02
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2 participants