Skill v1.0.0

name: detect-patterns description: 'Use when you need this Cognitive OS skill: Detect systemic problems in the Cognitive OS codebase: dead metadata, broken chains, phantom entries, and structural tests.; do not use when a narrower skill directly matches the task.' version: 1.0.0 user-invocable: true auto-generated: false last-updated: 2026-04-15 license: MIT metadata: author: luum audience: os-dev effort: haiku summary_line: 'Detect systemic problems in the Cognitive OS codebase: dead metadata, broken…' platforms:

• claude-code

prerequisites: [] routing_patterns:

• pattern: \bdetect[- ]?patterns?\b

confidence: 0.95

• pattern: \bpattern\s+detection\b

confidence: 0.8 routing_intents:

• intent: detect_systemic_repository_problems

description: User wants detectors run for recurring Cognitive OS structure issues such as dead metadata, broken chains, phantom entries, or structural test gaps. confidence: 0.87

• intent: audit_os_pattern_integrity

description: User asks for pattern-level health checks across OS metadata and references, not application behavior debugging or prose review. confidence: 0.83 triggers:

• detect-patterns
• /detect-patterns
• Run all detectors or a specific one
• 'Detect systemic problems in the Cognitive OS codebase: dead metadata, broken…'

<!-- SCOPE: os-only -->

Purpose

Systematically finds code-level rot that accumulates over time. Detects four categories of systemic problems:

1. Dead Metadata — frontmatter fields in SKILL.md files that no code ever reads
2. Broken Chains — imports or references to files that don't exist (symlink-aware)
3. Phantom Entries — catalog/config entries pointing to non-existent components
4. Structural Tests — tests that only check file existence, never exercise behavior

Invocation

/detect-patterns [--type dead-metadata|broken-chains|phantoms|structural-tests|all]

Default: --type all

What to Do

Step 1: Run the pattern detector

from cos_lib.pattern_detector import PatternDetector
detector = PatternDetector()
# Run all detectors or a specific one
if type_arg == "all":
    results = detector.run_all(project_dir)
else:
    results = detector.run_type(project_dir, type_arg)

Step 2: Format and present results

report = detector.format_report(results)
print(report)

Step 3: Summarize actionable items

Group findings by severity and present:

• CRITICAL — broken chains that will cause runtime errors. Fix immediately.
• WARNING — dead metadata and phantom entries. Fix during next cleanup.
• INFO — structural tests. Improve when touching those test files.

Step 4: Suggest next steps

• For broken chains: identify the source and target, suggest creating or fixing the reference
• For dead metadata: suggest removing unused frontmatter keys
• For phantoms: suggest creating the missing component or removing the catalog entry
• For structural tests: suggest adding behavioral assertions

Rules

• ALWAYS resolve symlinks with os.path.realpath() before checking existence
• ALWAYS handle try/except ImportError gracefully when checking Python imports
• When checking config flags, grep for the YAML key in .py and .sh files
• Report evidence: show what was checked and what was found/not found
• Do NOT auto-fix — report only, let the human decide