save-session logs no-work session starts (greetings/handoff) as memory entries — no SKIP for no-work

[eesb99]

Summary

The session summarizer logs no-work session starts (greetings / handoff acknowledgements) as if they were real memory entries, polluting the daily logs (today-*.md, recent.md). Observed on v0.8.2.

Examples of polluted entries

## 10:51 | main
Handoff loaded. Memory at `…` active. Recent work: …
What's next?

## 16:30 | main
I'm ready. I've loaded your environment context:
- Session starts here …
What's next?

Also seen: a multi-paragraph assistant reply captured verbatim under one header, and a literal unfilled ## HH:MM | main header.

Root cause

In prompts/save-session.prompt.txt, the only SKIP condition is "the conversation covers the SAME work as the previous entry." There is no SKIP for a session that contains no substantive work — so when a session is just a greeting / handoff-load / "what's next?", Haiku faithfully summarizes the greeting as the "work done".

Separately, scripts/save-session.sh (Step 5b) validates that the first line is a ## HH:MM | header but only logs a WARNING — it still appends a malformed entry (e.g. the literal ## HH:MM placeholder).

Suggested fix

1. Add a SKIP-on-no-work rule to save-session.prompt.txt: if the extract is only session-boundary chatter (greeting, readiness/orientation message, handoff acknowledgement, "what's next?", or the human merely continuing with no action), return SKIP.
2. (Optional, defense-in-depth) In save-session.sh Step 5b, drop non-conforming output instead of only warning — advance the saved position and exit without appending, mirroring the existing IS_SKIP path. A first-line regex check (^## ([0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}|[0-9]{1,2}:[0-9]{2} (AM|PM)) \|) cleanly distinguishes valid entries from greeting prose / placeholder headers, with no false positives on real entries.

Happy to send a PR if useful.

[fdaviddpt]

Yes please — both fixes, send the PR.

Fix #1 (SKIP-on-no-work) is the real fix. The current single SKIP (same-work-as-previous) has a gap: a no-work session has nothing to dedupe against, so Haiku faithfully summarizes the greeting as "the work." Catching it at the prompt level — where the model decides what's substantive — is correct. The scoped list (greeting / readiness / handoff-ack / "what's next?" / human-continuing-with-no-action) covers the observed cases.

Fix #2 (drop instead of warn) — keep it as defense-in-depth. The first-line regex ^## (HH:MM…) \| is a clean structural gate that kills literal ## HH:MM placeholders and any prose that slips past Fix #1. False-positive risk is low since real entries always lead with that header.

One thing to verify in the impl: the dropped-entry path must still advance the saved read position (you mention "mirroring the existing IS_SKIP path" — good). If a malformed entry is dropped without advancing the cursor, the next session re-reads the same chatter and re-attempts the bad summary every run. Just confirm the position advance fires on the drop.

Thanks for the clear root-cause writeup.