capture-learning_skill

Overview

This skill analyzes recent conversation context and captures concise, actionable learnings into either project-specific knowledge files or reusable skills/commands for cross-project use. It helps convert debugging outcomes, setup fixes, and discovered patterns into well-structured documentation entries and proposes changes for user confirmation before writing.

How this skill works

The skill reviews the recent chat to identify problem, root cause, solution, and prevention steps, then determines whether the insight is project-specific or general. For project-specific items it detects .claude/ CLAUDE.md or other docs and drafts a formatted entry; for general patterns it prepares updates to skills/commands. It always presents the target file, exact content, and diff preview and waits for explicit approval before applying changes.

When to use it

• After resolving a build, setup, or environment issue and you want to document the fix
• When you discover a non-obvious debugging step or diagnostic technique worth reusing
• If you identify a project-specific convention, dependency requirement, or CI quirk
• When a cross-project pattern or framework gotcha should become a reusable skill
• Whenever you tell the agent to “capture this learning”, “update the docs”, or “remember this for next time”

Best practices

• Extract concrete, actionable items: Problem → Cause → Solution (and Prevention) rather than vague summaries
• Decide scope first: project-specific entries go in .claude/ files; general patterns become skills/commands
• Prefer CLAUDE.md for general project notes, use troubleshooting.md or setup.md for targeted fixes
• Show the proposed file, section, and diff and require explicit user confirmation before writing
• Avoid recording secrets or sensitive data—document patterns without credentials

Example use cases

• Documenting that Node 20 requires npm install --legacy-peer-deps for this repo and adding it to .claude/CLAUDE.md
• Capturing a multi-step debugging process (symptoms, diagnostics, root cause) into .claude/docs/troubleshooting.md
• Promoting a framework gotcha (e.g., React Server Components constraints) into a reusable cross-project skill
• Adding required environment variable instructions to .claude/docs/setup.md after a setup session
• Noting an internal code convention (ApiError usage) into CLAUDE.md under Patterns for future contributors