Skip to content

fix: quote SKILL.md description values containing colons#1801

Open
ds1ter wants to merge 1 commit into
garrytan:mainfrom
ds1ter:fix/yaml-description-colon-quoting
Open

fix: quote SKILL.md description values containing colons#1801
ds1ter wants to merge 1 commit into
garrytan:mainfrom
ds1ter:fix/yaml-description-colon-quoting

Conversation

@ds1ter
Copy link
Copy Markdown

@ds1ter ds1ter commented May 30, 2026

Problem

8 SKILL.md files have description frontmatter values containing : (colon + space), which strict YAML parsers interpret as a new mapping key — causing this error:

invalid YAML: mapping values are not allowed in this context

Affected skills: design-html, design-consultation, design-review, design-shotgun, guard, plan-tune, setup-gbrain, ship

This breaks any tool that uses a strict YAML parser to load SKILL.md files (confirmed with OpenAI Codex CLI, which uses js-yaml in strict mode).

Fix

Wrap the affected description values in double quotes so the colon is unambiguously part of the string value, not a mapping indicator.

Before:

description: Design finalization: generates production-quality Pretext-native HTML/CSS. (gstack)

After:

description: "Design finalization: generates production-quality Pretext-native HTML/CSS. (gstack)"

Test

import yaml
# parses cleanly with PyYAML, js-yaml, and other strict parsers
yaml.safe_load('description: "Design finalization: generates foo"')

…rrors

Some SKILL.md frontmatter description fields contained `: ` (colon + space),
which strict YAML parsers (e.g. Codex CLI) interpret as a new mapping key,
causing "mapping values are not allowed in this context" errors.

Affected skills: design-html, design-consultation, design-review,
design-shotgun, guard, plan-tune, setup-gbrain, ship

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@jbetala7
Copy link
Copy Markdown
Contributor

Thanks for chasing the strict-YAML parse error — it's a real failure for js-yaml/Codex hosts. Heads up though: this looks already resolved on main, so the PR is effectively a no-op as written.

Not a knock on the diff — the repro and affected-skill list are accurate; it's just that the symptom was already swept up by #1808 and the root-cause guard is tracked in #1752.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

2 participants