Add template-version header to generated skills for drift detection #22

Problem

When a rule is promoted into create-dev-loop.md, every child skill silently lags until manually retrofitted. There is currently no programmatic way to detect which child skills are out of sync with the current template — the human has to remember and the retrofit checklist relies on diligence.

Concrete instance from this session: example-l-dev-loop and example-q-dev-loop had accumulated two levels of drift (one from PR #8, one from PR #15) before being noticed. The PR #8 drift had been sitting silently for months.

Motivation

Per RESEARCH.md §8 — Prompt and model drift is real and measurable: template/prompt drift is empirically observable. The retrofit checklist in CLAUDE.md is a workaround; a programmatic detector would make it self-correcting.

Confidence: medium (the phenomenon is well-attested; this specific mitigation is novel).

Proposal

Each generated skill carries a header line recording the create-dev-loop commit SHA it was generated from:

<!-- template-version: <git-sha> -->
<!-- generated-at: <iso-timestamp> -->

These are HTML comments so they don't render but are easy to grep.

In Step 6 of create-dev-loop.md (creating the GitHub repo), the agent records the upstream SHA at generation time using git -C ~/create-dev-loop rev-parse HEAD.

A example-h-dev-loop Phase 9 (self-audit) addition: compare the current create-dev-loop HEAD to the recorded template-version; if newer, file a drift-detection issue against the appropriate child-skill repo.

Acceptance criteria

• Generated skills include a <!-- template-version: ... --> header
• Step 6 of create-dev-loop.md populates the header from git rev-parse HEAD
• Step 4 substitution table has a row for TEMPLATE_VERSION and GENERATED_AT
• example-h-dev-loop Phase 9 includes a drift-detection step

Related

• Issue Scope create-dev-loop to also update existing dev loops #16 (update-mode) — this is a complementary mechanism; this enables detection, Scope create-dev-loop to also update existing dev loops #16 enables remediation
• RESEARCH.md §8

drafted by Claude on behalf of Daniel Stephenson