implement loses two of its five beats on unattended runs (review before commit, bare sub-skill names)

[jdestefano81]

*Written with Claude's help otherwise these would be 5 times longer with me trying to get my meandering thoughts across.

I've been running /mattpocock-skills:implement on small batches of tickets overnight in Claude Code (plugin install, 1.2.3). On more than one run, two of its five beats quietly didn't happen, and I only found out by reading the transcript the next morning. Each cause traces back to the skill body, which is still the same on main: (the relevant three lines)

1. The review runs before the commit. code-review diffs HEAD against a fixed point, so reviewing before committing hands it an empty diff. Its own guard would catch that, but only when a fixed point is supplied, and implement never passes one. Swapping the last two lines and saying "pass the fixed point explicitly" fixes it.

2. /tdd and /code-review are bare names. The plugin namespaces them as mattpocock-skills:tdd and mattpocock-skills:code-review, and bare /code-review resolves to Claude Code's built-in review instead. On one run the agent ran the built-in and skipped tdd entirely, with nothing in the output saying so. It looks like Standardize cross-skill invocation on "call the Skill tool" phrasing #878's "Call the Skill tool with" pass didn't reach implement. A line like "if a beat can't run, say so rather than substituting or skipping" would also have made this visible.

3. "Pre-agreed seams" has no unattended path. A design question rather than a bug. tdd says no test is written at an unconfirmed seam, and unattended there's no one to confirm with, so skipping tests is arguably tdd following its own rule. My tickets don't name seams, so I've tried a staging step: before the run, a normal attended session reads the tickets and the code and drafts the seams for each ticket. I read that list, and it goes into the run prompt as the written confirmation. I've only done this on one batch so far, so it's a suggestion rather than a proven pattern. My local copy also stops at the start if a ticket has no entry, instead of guessing. I'd be curious whether you'd want something like that in implement, or whether unattended runs are what implement-spec is meant to cover.

For now I've got a local copy that does all this, but I'd rather track upstream than keep a fork.

[Warshoow]

I can confirm points 1 and 2 with numbers. afk.sh (#1136) runs /implement on one ticket per headless session, and I went back through the transcripts of every session it has run on my machine: 173 in total. mattpocock-skills:tdd was called 0 times. The bare code-review resolved to the built-in review in 36 sessions; the plugin's mattpocock-skills:code-review ran in 18. As you said, nothing in the output shows any of this. You only see it in the transcript.

Until implement changes upstream, afk's prompt now works around it:

• it names the skills in full, mattpocock-skills:tdd and mattpocock-skills:code-review
• it asks for the commit first, then the review, with the HEAD from before the session as the fixed point
• a step the session can't run gets a line in its decision log instead of being skipped

On point 3 I went a different way than the staging step. The ticket's acceptance criteria already are a written confirmation that someone read before the run, so the prompt tells /tdd that the seams are the public interfaces the criteria name. Before its first test, the session writes the seams it picked into its log, and I read that in the morning. If a criterion can't be tested at such an interface, the session writes that down rather than testing internals. Unlike your version, a ticket with no testable seam still runs; the log just says so. The reason is that I didn't want a second list next to the criteria to keep in sync.

That part isn't proven yet. The harness checks what the prompt says, not what a real session does with it. After the next real run I'll count the tdd calls again and post them here.

The real fix is still the one you describe: swap the last two lines and use the namespaced names.