| name | claudeception |
| description | Use when reviewing what was learned after debugging, workaround discovery, or trial-and-error investigation, and capture it as a dated journal entry under ~/.claude/journal |
Claudeception
Claudeception captures episodic memory from work sessions.
It does not create or update skills. Its job is to preserve what happened, what was learned, and why it mattered in a dated journal entry that can be searched later or promoted through a separate workflow.
When To Use
Use this skill when any of these are true:
- A task required non-obvious debugging or investigation
- A workaround or recovery path was discovered through trial and error
- An error message was misleading and the real root cause was learned
- A project-specific or system-specific constraint was uncovered
- The user asks
/claudeception
- The user says "save this as a skill", "extract a skill from this", or "what did we learn?"
Do not use this skill to create durable procedural knowledge. If the learning should become a reusable skill, leave that for a separate promotion step.
Core Rule
Never create a skill from this skill.
Even when the user says "save this as a skill", honor the intent by writing a journal entry unless they explicitly ask for a separate skill-writing workflow.
Capture Threshold
Write a journal entry when the session produced knowledge that is worth preserving, even if it is narrow or specific to one system.
Good journal material:
- Incident-specific discoveries
- System quirks and deployment gotchas
- Root causes behind confusing failures
- Investigated tradeoffs and workarounds
- Repeated patterns that are not generalized yet
Skip capture when:
- The task was a routine documentation lookup
- The conclusion is already covered cleanly by an existing skill or project docs
- The note would mostly restate obvious knowledge
- The note would require storing secrets or sensitive internal details
Output Location
Write entries to:
~/.claude/journal/YYYY-MM-DD-topic-slug.md
Examples:
~/.claude/journal/2026-04-05-fastly-draft-version-publish-mismatch.md~/.claude/journal/2026-04-05-nextjs-server-side-error-debugging.md
If multiple notes land on the same date with the same slug, add a short suffix.
Entry Format
Use the template in resources/journal-entry-template.md.
Every entry should include:
- Frontmatter with
date, title, tags, and source_trigger
- A short factual description of what happened
- The actual learning, not just the symptoms
- Evidence such as errors, commands, files, or observations
- A brief reuse signal describing whether this looks one-off or recurring
Keep the note concrete. Journal entries are not polished runbooks.
Workflow
- Review the task or session
- Isolate the single learning worth preserving
- Choose a dated filename with a concise slug
- Write the journal entry using the template
- Include exact evidence and the real takeaway
- Stop after writing the entry
Do not create a new skill.
Do not update an existing skill.
Do not generalize beyond what the evidence supports.
Retrospective Mode
When /claudeception is invoked at the end of a session:
- Review the session for journal-worthy learnings
- Prefer one focused entry per distinct incident or discovery
- If there are multiple unrelated learnings, write separate entries
- Summarize what was captured and where it was written
Quality Gates
Before finalizing a journal entry, verify:
- The filename is dated
- The note describes something actually observed or verified
- The writeup includes evidence or concrete trigger conditions
- The note preserves local context instead of inflating it into a general skill
- No secrets, credentials, or sensitive URLs are included
- No new skill files were created
Anti-Patterns
- Turning every discovery into a reusable skill
- Rewriting the note as a polished runbook
- Stripping away the concrete system context that made the discovery useful
- Capturing vague conclusions without evidence
- Creating duplicate journal entries for the same learning in the same session
Self-Check Prompts
Ask:
- What happened that was not obvious at the start?
- What was the actual root cause or constraint?
- What would future-me want to grep for?
- Is this a concrete incident note or a reusable procedure?
If it is an incident note, write it to the journal.
If it is a reusable procedure, do not create it here. Leave it for a separate promotion workflow.
