the inverse of an affordance, and deliberately so:
affordance body always compiled in, description never sent
skill description always compiled in, body read on demand
an affordance is a fact about the surface — short, and every conversation
needs it. a skill is reference material that is dead weight in a conversation
about something else. so what reaches the prompt is the index: name, when to
reach for it, and the path. measured on the first one: 608 characters in the
prompt against 6,070 bytes left on disk.
no protocol. progressive disclosure is normally a harness feature — claude
code discovers .claude/skills, opencode has its own conventions, the next one
will have a third — and pointing at a file needs none of that, because every
harness worth running can already read a file. the cost is that the agent has
to CHOOSE to open it, which is what the description is for and why a vague one
makes a skill useless rather than merely verbose.
the first skill is the email database, moved out of tools/email-db/TOOL.md
where NOTHING has been reading it: the loader parses frontmatter and discards
the body, so that schema and its eight queries have never reached any claude
code session. written for pi, inert since pi left.
it carries two things the schema alone gets wrong, both measured against the
real 19,097-message database rather than copied from the old doc: `read` is
populated on 93 rows, so the documented unread query returns essentially the
whole mailbox; and `labels` is a comma-separated string with real values like
`updates,inbox`, so `labels = 'inbox'` misses most of the inbox.
plugins can ship skills, published and unpublished on install like affordances
and notification catalogues. flat namespace unlike those two — a skill's
directory name is the path an agent reads, and `officerdev/gitea/SKILL.md` in
a prompt is noise. a skill has no authority to usurp, so nothing needs
protecting.
wired to claude code. opencode still gets NOTHING — its runner sends no system
prompt at all, and session create takes only a directory. that needs its own
channel and a guess would be worse than the gap.
the header's rescan walks ITEM_TYPES, and affordances are not one — no
directory per item, no canonical file — so they were invisible to it. write a
new affordance, press the button, and nothing in the response mentions it.
counted by LOADING them rather than counting .md files, so the number means
"affordances the agent will actually receive" and not "markdown files
present": one with no body is skipped by the loader and should not be reported
as though it were working.
counting is as far as this can honestly go, and the toast now says so.
affordanceBlock() is read when a chat session is CREATED, so a new affordance
is already live without a server restart — for the NEXT session. nothing can
retrofit one into a conversation already running, because its system prompt
was assembled when it started. the button's value here is "the file is on disk
and the platform can see it", which was the part genuinely unknowable from the
UI.
also creates the affordances directory, so it is discoverable on a machine
that has never had one, the same way the item dirs already are.
Right-click an entry and agents whose triggers match appear under their own Run Agent
submenu — deliberately not folded in with tasks, because an agent run is a chat session and
not a job, and one menu promising both would lie about what a click does. The modal shows the
absolute target path, autofills entry_path with it (tilde expansion stays the server's job),
and on Run links to /chat?cwd=<runs dir> instead of a queue entry: there is no job row to view.
Trigger matching and category grouping are now shared with tasks rather than duplicated, and
the task input form is reused as-is.
Rescan counts agents and invalidates their caches, so a new AGENT.md shows up on the button
rather than after the 60s staleTime.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
New POST /api/rescan re-runs the boot item setup (ensureItemDirs +
ensureToolLoader) and returns live item counts; the header button calls it
and invalidates the item query caches so the UI refetches from disk.
Also fix ensure-tool-loader to write into OFFICER_ITEMS_DIR/extensions (the
runtime read path) instead of the now-unread DATA_PATH/extensions.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhas
