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svy04svy04/ballast/skills/doctor/SKILL.md

doctor

Skill73 starsChanged 3 months agoMITView on GitHub

Health check for the ballast installation — is the hook alive, are the catalogs sane, is anything silently dead. Use when rules stop arriving, the session-start line is missing, the user asks "is ballast working", or after an update or reinstall.

81 other projects use a version of this.

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Most recently taken up by

Used with

Projects with it also use uninstall, cancel and 7 more.

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Files found in the same public projects as a version of this one, more often than they turn up anywhere else. Each project counts once, large collections count for less, and this file's own repository is left out.
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The file

We split this skill into the rules it gives an agent

1 rule. 0 are common, 1 is distinctive, and 0 are very specific to this project.

  • 0

    Common

    Most of the 61 edited versions we read keep these.

  • 1

    Distinctive

    This author's own choices. Worth a look.

  • 0

    Very specific

    Tied to their project's names, files or tools. Probably skip.

  • Common
  • Distinctive
  • Very specific
  1. Distinctive:

    Never hide what you could not check.

    line 11

“Common” is measured: kept by at least 6 in 10 of the 61 edited versions of this file we could read. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.

Keep what fits and drop the rest. Your version, ready for your agents.
Files
SKILL.md

Doctor — silence diagnosed, not trusted

The failure mode this skill exists for: a dead hook looks exactly like a quiet one. Doctor tells them apart, and reports in four states — healthy, off (disabled on purpose), broken (something the user relies on is not happening), unchecked (could not be verified). Three rules govern the report:

  • Off is not a problem. BALLAST_DISABLE=1 or BALLAST_QUIET=1 set on purpose gets reported as "off — as configured", never as a failure.
  • Never hide what you could not check. An "unchecked" row is information; silently skipping it is not.
  • "Fixed" is claimed only after re-running the check that failed.

Checks, in order

  1. node exists, version ≥ 18 — node --version. Missing node means every other check is moot; the fix (install node) is the user's, with a link.
  2. Hook wiring — the plugin's hooks/hooks.json parses and its script file exists. Find the plugin root via CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT or claude plugin list.
  3. Live fire — run the engine's status line for real: node .../ballast-rules.mjs --status. The line appearing IS the proof; a wiring check alone is not (a manifest that parses can still fail to load — that was ballast's own 0.8.1 bug).
  4. Off switches — BALLAST_DISABLE, BALLAST_QUIET, BALLAST_NO_LOG set? Report as "off — as configured" and ask nothing.
  5. Catalog presence — user (~/.claude/ballast.rules.json) and project paths. Neither existing is not broken; it is "before first setup" — point at the setup skill.
  6. Catalog health — run node .../ballast-rules.mjs --check. It flags parse failures, rules that can never fire, patterns that do not compile, duplicate ids, and budget overruns (20+ rules, 3+ always-on). Translate its findings to plain words: "rule 3's detection condition is broken", not the regex error.
  7. Delivery history — run node .../ballast-rules.mjs --report. An empty log with an old install suggests keywords in the wrong language or a hook that died some time ago; cross-check with check 3.
  8. Language pairing — keywords in one language while the user chats in another is the top silent killer of rules. Compare catalog keywords against the language of the current conversation.
  9. Memory files (optional) — memory/ absent is "off — brain-init not used", not a failure. If present, confirm DECISIONS.md exists.
  10. Self-instrument — say whether every check above actually ran. A doctor that skipped half its checks and printed "healthy" is the exact disease it treats.

Report shape

Broken first (each: one plain sentence on what stopped working for the user → the fix path), then unchecked, then off in one line, then "N healthy". Close with a four-cell summary: auto-fixed / awaiting approval / user's hands / healthy·off·unchecked.

Repairs come in three tiers: harmless ones you just do (creating a missing .claude/ folder); catalog edits proposed one at a time and applied only on approval — the user is the author of their rules, doctor included; node installs and plugin reinstalls stay in the user's hands, with exact commands.

Part of ballast — foundations first, every solved path kept, done means checks pass.

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