v1.7.0: dangling symlink at .claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md breaks /career-ops

[jeromepowell]

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow the Code of Conduct

Existing issues

• I searched existing issues and this hasn't been reported yet

What happened?

The v1.7.0 auto-update converts .claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md from a regular file into a symlink pointing to ../../../.agents/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md, but the target directory .agents/skills/career-ops/ is never created. The symlink dangles, so Claude Code (and any CLI scanning .claude/skills/) cannot load the skill, and /career-ops stops being recognized as a slash command.

The dangling symlink is committed at HEAD:

$ git ls-tree HEAD .claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md
120000 blob 82b454738b2a048650713a9e6a9f502e156c0440  .claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md

$ git cat-file -p 82b454738b2a048650713a9e6a9f502e156c0440
../../../.agents/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md

$ ls .agents
ls: .agents: No such file or directory

Introduced in commit 79534d4 ("chore: auto-update system files to v1.7.0"), which deletes the original 95-line SKILL.md and replaces it with the dangling symlink in a single change. No .agents/ tree is added in the same commit.

npm run doctor does not catch this (all checks pass), so users only discover it the next time they try to invoke /career-ops.

Steps to reproduce

1. Start from a working v1.6.0 install where /career-ops is recognized.
2. Apply the v1.7.0 update (node update-system.mjs apply) or fresh-clone the repo at HEAD.
3. Restart your CLI so it re-scans .claude/skills/.
4. Try to invoke /career-ops. The slash command is no longer recognized.
5. Confirm with readlink .claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md and ls .agents (target does not exist).

Expected behavior

Either:

• The update creates the .agents/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md target alongside the symlink, so the link resolves, or
• .claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md remains a regular file until the .agents/ layout is fully introduced.

Bonus: doctor.mjs could verify that any symlinks under .claude/skills/ resolve to existing files, since this failure mode is silent today.

CLI tool

Claude Code

OS and Node.js version

macOS 26.1 / Node v22.14.0

Output of npm run doctor

> career-ops@1.7.0 doctor
> node doctor.mjs

career-ops doctor
================

✓ Node.js >= 18 (v22.14.0)
✓ Dependencies installed
✓ Playwright chromium installed
✓ cv.md found
✓ config/profile.yml found
✓ portals.yml found
✓ Fonts directory ready
✓ data/ directory ready
✓ output/ directory ready
✓ reports/ directory ready

Result: All checks passed. You're ready to go! Run `claude` to start.

[github-actions]

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[jeromepowell]

Recreate the missing target from the pre-update blob:

mkdir -p .agents/skills/career-ops
git show 79534d4^:.claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md > .agents/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md

Restart the CLI and /career-ops is recognized again.

[af-chacon]

+1, hit this on Linux (Arch) / Node v23.4.0 right after applying v1.7.0 via node update-system.mjs apply.

Different workaround, same outcome. I went the other direction from @jeromepowell replaced the dangling symlink with a real file containing the v1.6.0 content:

git show <pre-1.7.0-commit>:.claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md \
> .claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md.tmp
rm .claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md
mv .claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md.tmp .claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md

/career-ops is recognized again after a session restart. Forward-compat note: when the fix ships I'll need to swap back to the symlink layout, so @jeromepowell 's .agents/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md approach is probably the better workaround for users who don't want to revisit this.

[Thomasevano]

Recreate the missing target from the pre-update blob:

mkdir -p .agents/skills/career-ops
git show 79534d4^:.claude/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md > .agents/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md
Restart the CLI and /career-ops is recognized again.

It worked for me thank you, but to use with the last commit sha1 of the version, this one seems to not exist

[jeromepowell]

Thanks @Thomasevano the SHA in my workaround was local-only.

Here's a workaround that doesn't depend on any local SHA:

git fetch origin main
git checkout origin/main -- .agents/skills/career-ops/SKILL.md

This pulls the canonical file straight from upstream into the working tree, and /career-ops is recognized again after a CLI restart.

So I think the fix lives in update-system.mjs: it needs to sync the .agents/ tree (and any other new top-level dirs introduced by the update) the same way it syncs .claude/skills/. Otherwise every user on v1.6.x who runs the auto-updater hits this.