Gardening Skills Wiki

Overview

The skills wiki needs regular maintenance to stay healthy: links break, skills get orphaned, naming drifts, INDEX files fall out of sync.

Core principle: Automate health checks to maintain wiki quality without burning tokens on manual inspection.

When to Use

Run gardening after:

• Adding new skills
• Removing or renaming skills
• Reorganizing categories
• Updating cross-references
• Suspicious that links are broken

Periodic maintenance:

• Weekly during active development
• Monthly during stable periods

Quick Health Check

# Run all checks
~/.claude/skills/meta/gardening-skills-wiki/garden.sh

# Or run specific checks
~/.claude/skills/meta/gardening-skills-wiki/check-links.sh
~/.claude/skills/meta/gardening-skills-wiki/check-naming.sh
~/.claude/skills/meta/gardening-skills-wiki/check-index-coverage.sh

# Analyze search gaps (what skills are missing)
~/.claude/skills/meta/gardening-skills-wiki/analyze-search-gaps.sh

The master script runs all checks and provides a health report.

What Gets Checked

1. Link Validation (check-links.sh)

Checks:

• Backtick-wrapped @ links - backticks disable resolution
• Relative paths like skills/ or skills/gardening-skills-wiki/~/ - should use skills/ absolute paths
• All skills/ references resolve to existing files
• Skills referenced in INDEX files exist
• Orphaned skills (not in any INDEX)

Fixes:

• Remove backticks from @ references
• Convert skills/ and skills/gardening-skills-wiki/~/ relative paths to skills/ absolute paths
• Update broken skills/ references to correct paths
• Add orphaned skills to their category INDEX
• Remove references to deleted skills

2. Naming Consistency (check-naming.sh)

Checks:

• Directory names are kebab-case
• No uppercase or underscores in directory names
• Frontmatter fields present (name, description, when_to_use, version, type)
• Skill names use active voice (not "How to...")
• Empty directories

Fixes:

• Rename directories to kebab-case
• Add missing frontmatter fields
• Remove empty directories
• Rephrase names to active voice

3. INDEX Coverage (check-index-coverage.sh)

Checks:

• All skills listed in their category INDEX
• All category INDEX files linked from main INDEX
• Skills have descriptions in INDEX entries

Fixes:

• Add missing skills to INDEX files
• Add category links to main INDEX
• Add descriptions for INDEX entries

Common Issues and Fixes

Broken Links

❌ BROKEN: skills/debugging/root-cause-tracing
   Target: /path/to/skills/debugging/root-cause-tracing/SKILL.md

Fix: Update the reference path - skill might have moved or been renamed.

Orphaned Skills

⚠️  ORPHANED: test-invariants/SKILL.md not in testing/INDEX.md

Fix: Add to the category INDEX:

- skills/gardening-skills-wiki/test-invariants - Description of skill

Backtick-Wrapped Links

❌ BACKTICKED: skills/testing/condition-based-waiting on line 31
   File: getting-started/SKILL.md
   Fix: Remove backticks - use bare @ reference

Fix: Remove backticks:

# ❌ Bad - backticks disable link resolution
`skills/testing/condition-based-waiting`

# ✅ Good - bare @ reference
skills/testing/condition-based-waiting

Relative Path Links

❌ RELATIVE: skills/testing in coding/SKILL.md
   Fix: Use skills/ absolute path instead

Fix: Convert to absolute path:

# ❌ Bad - relative paths are brittle
skills/testing/condition-based-waiting

# ✅ Good - absolute skills/ path
skills/testing/condition-based-waiting

Naming Issues

⚠️  Mixed case: TestingPatterns (should be kebab-case)

Fix: Rename directory:

cd ~/.claude/skills/testing
mv TestingPatterns testing-patterns
# Update all references to old name

Missing from INDEX

❌ NOT INDEXED: condition-based-waiting/SKILL.md

Fix: Add to testing/INDEX.md:

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