fix(skills): wire evening journal, gate Reminders steps, safe Tasks.md clear-down, sync-ready focus items

[davekilleen]

Fixes four verified workflow gaps from Michelle's 5–6 August power-user feedback. Every finding was re-verified against main before changing anything. Related: #139 (instruction reliability — "the instruction exists but doesn't reliably fire" is exactly this category).

What was wrong, and what changed

1. Evening journaling never fired from the daily review (daily-review Step 11)
The step was a one-line stub — "prompt for evening reflection" — that never invoked the real /journal evening flow that already exists with proper prompts. Michelle enabled journaling mid-day and her evening review ran straight through without a single journal question. Step 11 now runs the actual journal flow: checks for an existing entry, pulls in the morning intention, guides the prompts one at a time, and skips gracefully if declined or disabled.

2. Reminders steps without a failure gate (daily-review Steps 2.55 & 2.6; also found in daily-plan 5.7 & 7.5)
Verification note: the task brief said daily-plan's Reminders steps had been removed on main — they haven't. What main actually has is a skip-silently gate ("if the tool is unavailable or errors…", added in 1c636aa2) on some steps. daily-review Step 2.6 had no gate at all, and daily-plan Step 5.7 had the identical hole (7.5 gated "unavailable" but not errors). All Reminders steps in both skills now carry the same gate, plus a pointer to the newly documented VS Code limitation so the model never suggests "reinstall and reconfigure" for something that can't work.

3. Weekly Tasks.md clear-down could orphan multi-line tasks (week-review, Follow-up Actions)
The instruction was a bare "Archive completed items", which invites a per-line sweep of [x] lines. Tasks.md entries span multiple lines (indented priority/due/notes sub-lines, continuation paragraphs), so a per-line delete strands fragments — and can also delete completed sub-checkboxes out from under still-open tasks. The instruction now defines a task block precisely, requires removing whole blocks only when the block's own top-level checkbox is [x], and confirms with the user before deleting.

4. "Today's Focus" items never synced (daily-plan Step 6 + plan template)
Verified against the code: Work MCP completion sync (update_task_status → update_task_status_everywhere → find_task_by_id) only matches a line containing both the literal - [ ]/- [x] checkbox and the ^task-YYYYMMDD-XXX anchor on that same line. The template rendered focus items as numbered checkboxes (1. [ ]) with no ID — doubly invisible to sync (numbered checkboxes don't contain the - [ ] string the matcher looks for, even with an ID). The template now uses dash checkboxes with a {{^task-id}} placeholder, and Step 6 mandates embedding the real task ID inline for any focus item that maps to a Tasks.md task — creating the task first via create_task when it doesn't exist yet.

Also: documented the VS Code + Apple Reminders limitation. Michelle verified that macOS never shows the Reminders/EventKit permission dialog to Claude Code running inside the VS Code extension, and a Terminal.app grant does not transfer. Added a "Known limitation" section to docs/Dex_System/Calendar_Setup.md (mirrored byte-identically to the 06-Resources bridge copy) with the working alternative: run Dex from a standalone terminal.

Verification

• python scripts/check-instructed-tools.py ✅ (caught and fixed one wording issue: an internal function named as if it were an MCP tool)
• bash scripts/check-architecture-inventory.sh ✅
• bash scripts/check-doc-drift.sh ✅ · bash scripts/check-test-delta.sh ✅
• bash scripts/check-pii.sh ✅ · bash scripts/check-founder-content.sh ✅
• No Python/Node code changed, so the test suites are unaffected (docs + skill instruction files only).

Proposed CHANGELOG entry (not committed — for the release that picks this up)

Your evening wind-down, your task list, and your daily plan now keep their promises

A power user who runs Dex every day spent a full day checking what actually happens versus what Dex promises, and found four places where a written promise quietly wasn't kept. Thank you, Michelle.

What this fixes for you:

• Evening journaling actually happens now. If you turned on evening journaling, the end-of-day review used to skip right past it without asking a single question. Now it walks you through your evening reflection properly — and steps aside just as quietly if you've already journaled or say no thanks.
• Ticking off a focus item now counts everywhere. Items in your daily plan's "Today's Focus" were written in a way Dex's completion tracking couldn't see, so finishing one never updated your task list, and finishing a task never updated the plan. Focus items are now written so both sides stay in step.
• The weekly tidy-up of your task list can't leave scraps behind anymore. Some tasks take several lines — a due date here, a note there. The old clean-up could remove a task's first line and strand the rest. It now removes each finished task whole, and tells you what it's clearing before it does.
• No more dead-end advice about phone reminders. If you use Dex inside VS Code (a popular code editor), Apple's reminders simply can't be reached from there — that's how the Mac's privacy protections work, not something a reinstall fixes. Dex now knows this, skips those steps quietly, and the setup guide explains the one change that helps: run Dex from a regular Terminal window instead.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[github-actions]

What this pull request touches

• skills — feeds the guided workflows and commands people use with Dex.

Gates that will judge this change

• Personal-data gate: added lines must not expose real identities or personal vault content.
• Change-aware gates: source changes are checked for tests, path-contract use, documentation drift, and touched-file coverage.
• Tests and coverage: the Python, MCP, migration, hook, and script suites must remain healthy.
• Safety and quality: security, lint, distribution, path consistency, and large-vault checks still apply.

Based on 5 changed files.