[JesseKoldewijn]

Problem

skills/plan-huge/SKILL.md fails YAML frontmatter parsing on pi 0.8.5. The description's unquoted scalar contains plan-big: an abstract ... — a colon followed by a space, which is invalid inside a plain YAML scalar.

Observed on pi startup:

[Skill conflicts]
  ~/.pi/agent/npm/node_modules/pi-plans/skills/plan-huge/SKILL.md
    Nested mappings are not allowed in compact mappings at line 2, column 14:

description: Create a huge Pi plan for multi-version product builds. Use when t…
             ^

GitHub's markdown renderer rejects the same file:

Error in user YAML: (<unknown>): mapping values are not allowed in this context at line 2 column 113

Column 113 is exactly the plan-big: colon.

Fix

Replace the colon with an em-dash:

-bigger than plan-big: an abstract overall plan
+bigger than plan-big — an abstract overall plan

The description stays an unquoted plain scalar, consistent with the other plan-* skills (none of which contain : in their descriptions). No wording or meaning change.

Verification

• npm run validate → validated 7 skills, 4 references, 2 agents, 15 tools, 2 docs, readme 12 checks
• npm test → 741 pass, 0 fail
• Frontmatter parses cleanly with the yaml package; name: plan-huge and description text are otherwise intact

Reproduced on pi-plans 0.8.5 installed via ~/.pi/agent/npm/node_modules.

[JesseKoldewijn]

Hey @MaxInGaussian just a friendly nudge for this small issue that causes for some formatting warnings after the update of yesterday, cheers! 🤙

[MaxInGaussian]

Hi Jesse — thank you for this, and for such a clear report. Your diagnosis is exactly right, and the reproduction made it easy to confirm.

The plan-big: an abstract ... colon-space really was invalid inside that unquoted plain scalar. Parsing the frontmatter the way a YAML reader does confirms it: before the change, description came back not as a string but as a nested mapping, which is precisely the "Nested mappings are not allowed in compact mappings" error you saw on pi startup. Two independent parsers (pi and GitHub's markdown renderer) agreeing on it was genuinely useful evidence.

One note on verification, offered only to add to yours: npm run validate and npm test both pass with or without this fix, so neither gate was what caught it. The breakage was only visible at skill-load time, which is also why it reached you as a warning after an update rather than as a red build.

I've applied the identical one-character change directly on the latest main (0.9.1) rather than merging this branch, mainly because the branch was based on 0.8.5 and is now some way behind. So I'm closing this rather than merging — not because anything is wrong with the change, but because the same edit now lives on main and merging would just duplicate it.

Really appreciate you taking the time to report this properly, with a reproduction and a minimal fix. That's exactly the kind of contribution that makes a project better. Please do keep an eye on the repo — reports like this are always welcome.

[JesseKoldewijn]

No problem at all man! 🤙