homericintelligence/.claude-plugin/skills/consolidate-pre-commit-excludes

Skill: Consolidate Pre-commit Exclude Patterns

Overview

| Field | Value | |-----------|---------------------------------------------------| | Date | 2026-02-20 | | Issue | #782 | | PR | #828 | | Objective | Consolidate shellcheck exclude patterns into a single combined regex | | Outcome | Success — one-line change, all hooks passed | | Category | ci-cd |

When to Use

• A pre-commit hook has a standalone exclude: for one path while other hooks use combined regexes
• A follow-up issue asks to standardise exclude patterns across hooks
• You need to add build/ or another common directory to an existing hook's exclude list
• Reviewers flag inconsistent exclude conventions in .pre-commit-config.yaml

Verified Workflow

1. Read the current config

   cat .pre-commit-config.yaml
   

   Look for hooks that have a lone exclude: vs hooks that use ^(path1/|path2/) combined patterns.

2. Identify the target hook and compare its exclude: against the project convention (other hooks).

3. Apply the one-line fix — replace (or add) the exclude: field with a combined regex:

   exclude: ^(build/|docs/arxiv/)
   

   Place exclude: immediately after description: and before files: to match the ordering used by other hooks.

4. Verify locally

   pixi run pre-commit run shellcheck --all-files
   

   Expected output: ShellCheck...Passed

5. Commit, push, and open PR

   git add .pre-commit-config.yaml
   git commit -m "chore(pre-commit): consolidate shellcheck exclude patterns into single regex"
   git push -u origin <branch>
   gh pr create --title "..." --body "Closes #<issue>"
   gh pr merge --auto --rebase <pr-number>
   

Failed Attempts

| Attempt | What happened | Why it failed | |---------|---------------|---------------| | Used Skill tool (commit-commands:commit) | Permission denied — session running in don't-ask mode | Skill tool blocked; fell back to direct git + gh CLI commands |

Results & Parameters

Final change (.pre-commit-config.yaml)

  # Shell script linting
  - repo: https://github.com/shellcheck-py/shellcheck-py
    rev: v0.9.0.6
    hooks:
      - id: shellcheck
        name: ShellCheck
        description: Lint shell scripts and templates for best practices
        exclude: ^(build/|docs/arxiv/)   # <-- added line
        files: \.(sh|bash|sh\.template)$
        types: [text]
        args: ['--exclude=SC1091']

Convention observed in this repo

| Hook | Exclude pattern | |-------------------|------------------------------------------| | markdownlint-cli2 | combined regex (notes, build, docs/arxiv, docs/design) | | yamllint | ^(\.pixi\|build)/ | | shellcheck | ^(build/\|docs/arxiv/) (after this fix) |

Markdownlint-cli2 full pattern:

^(notes/(plan|issues|review|blog)/|build/|docs/template\.md|docs/arxiv/|docs/design/figures/)

Notes

• The fix is purely cosmetic/convention — no functional behaviour changes if the paths were already excluded by separate patterns (in this case docs/arxiv/ was the only previously-excluded path; build/ was new)
• Always check whether build/ should also be excluded when adding docs/arxiv/ — generated content in both directories should not trigger linting errors