capture

Record what you just worked out

Write a file into .chamnan/skills/<short-name>.md.

First: is this already covered somewhere?

Before writing anything, check what the workspace already has. A skill you write can collide with one that arrived from a plugin the person installed, and the collision is invisible to them: nothing errors, both files look authoritative, and the only symptom is the assistant answering inconsistently on exactly the kind of work the skill covers. Someone who is not an engineer has no way to connect that to a file.

python3 -c "import sys; sys.path.insert(0, '<plugin>/lib'); import skill_overlap; \
            [print(o['kind'], o['name']) for o in skill_overlap.overlaps('.')]"

skill_overlap.overlaps() reports only what is true by construction — the same name in two active stores with different contents, one name served by two plugins, or a workspace file that repeats a shipped skill's text verbatim. It does not score similarity: that was prototyped over the 26 real skills here and measured unusable in both directions (over 100 of 325 pairs scored above an 0.35 title threshold on shared boilerplate alone, while no pair scored above 0.30 on body content — so it would cry wolf constantly and stay silent on a real duplicate written in other words).

What to do with a result: record it, do not refuse. If the check names something, say so in one line and extend the existing skill rather than writing a second one beside it. Nothing here blocks the capture — a refusal the person cannot understand or override is worse than the overlap, and the host ignores disable-model-invocation anyway (claude-code#22345), so a hard gate could not be enforced where it would matter.

When this is worth doing

• A task took several steps that were not obvious, and will come up again
• Something failed in a way that was expensive to diagnose
• You have now done the same thing a third time
• A decision was made whose reason will not be visible in the code afterwards