v2.0.0: Progressive disclosure, self-improvements from six months of continuous use, and a round of community fixes

[rebelytics]

This is the first tagged release of task-observer. It's numbered v2.0.0 because the project didn't start here: the monolithic SKILL.md that ran for the first six months was effectively v1, and this release restructures it.

Progressive disclosure

SKILL.md is now a lean, always-loaded core (roughly a third of its former size), with the episodic material split into three reference files that agents load on demand: the comprehensive review procedure, the skill authoring rules, and the environment setup guide. Your per-session token overhead drops massively, and nothing was lost in the move. The skill now also carries a bundle manifest and degrades gracefully if a reference file is missing from an install.

The split was proposed, prototyped and largely built by @Sloppy0726. Thank you!

Self-improvements from six months of continuous use

The version you get here is not the version I started with. The skill watches every session it runs in, including its own behaviour, and logs what could work better. Over six months of daily use, that loop has produced hundreds of refinements that are all baked into this release: numbering discipline with verification steps so log entries never collide, date-gated archival that keeps the observation log lean as resolved entries accumulate, the cross-cutting principles file that raises the quality floor across a whole skill library, a staging workflow that keeps the agent from editing live skill files directly, and pre-delivery gates that catch truncated bundles before they reach you. None of these were designed up front. They were all observed, logged and applied by the skill itself.

Community fixes

This release also ships fixes proposed by the people using the skill, each co-authored with the person who suggested it:

• External links in the skill files are now references for the human reader only. The agent is never instructed to fetch external content, and no external page overrides the skill files (suggested by @Jokeestd, a security improvement)
• Activation setup now handles governance-protected CLAUDE.md files: no retries, no bypasses, no silent skips (@amcoolio)
• The review modes now name scheduler reachability regimes, so nobody registers a scheduled review that physically can't reach the observation log (@amcoolio)
• The workspace folder is anchored on stable project identity, with a warning when it resolves to an ephemeral path like a git worktree (@dmblack83)
• The Pre-Flight Principle now covers embedded command snippets: run them against real data before a skill ships (@DurteDame, whose issue was filed by the agent running the skill, following the skill's own feedback routing)

Also included: a fix for the first-install review trigger (last-review-date.txt now starts as "never" instead of being ambiguous, also thanks to @Sloppy0726) and hardened concurrency handling in the observation log's write path, reported by u/rlbond86 in an adversarial review on Reddit.

One-file install

Attached to this release you'll find task-observer.skill: the complete bundle as a single file. Download it and upload it via Settings → Capabilities in your Claude account, and you're done. No cloning, no zipping. The README has instructions for other environments.

If you run into anything, open an issue. As this release shows, they get read and fixed.

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This discussion was created from the release v2.0.0: Progressive disclosure, self-improvements from six months of continuous use, and a round of community fixes.

[rebelytics]

Tagging @AllstarGER, who published a Codex version of the skill: no action needed of course, but just a heads-up about this major restructure. Looking at the structure of your version, it might not be relevant though.

And thanks for building and sharing the Codex version, by the way: I never thanked you directly, but I found it while scanning forks and gladly linked it in the readme. I see it's getting some traction too, so nice job! Happy to connect whenever you're up for it.

[chrooke]

If we've been running an earlier version and it has updated itself, how does upgrading work? I only see instructions for fresh installs. I didn't see anything specific in the guide or readme. I would hate to lose the customizations to the skill itself that it has figured out for me.