SKILL.md tells a dispatching agent to read the matching reference file
"and no other". The retrofit moved the `pre-commit clean` confirmation
gate out of the always-loaded body into references/clean.md, but
references/failure-patterns.md — loaded by the diagnosis route, not the
clean route — prescribes `pre-commit clean` with no gate at all. So "why
is this hook failing" could wipe the machine-wide cache at
~/.cache/pre-commit for every repo without asking.
The gate returns to the body, where every branch loads it, and is
restated at the point of use in failure-patterns.md. It is its own
section rather than a Gotchas bullet because folding it in pushed the
Gotchas ratio to 41%, whose only suggested remedy is moving it back to
references/ — the move that caused this.
The fixer-hook rule had the same shape: reachable only behind "if the
cause is not obvious from the output", which is false precisely when
pre-commit prints `- files were modified by this hook`. The fix
(`git add -u && git commit`) and the prohibition on `pre-commit install -f`
are now unconditional, and the two weakened pointers that stranded them
are restored.
Found by an independent review of this branch.
Refs #99
Defame1297
93d3263f8c