lcm dogfood

Proves what only a live install can: the installed plugin, the configured summarizer and the user's own memory working together. Hook output shapes, daemon-down behaviour and command options stay out of this skill; test/e2e/ exercises them against an isolated daemon.

Run every phase, or only $0. The target is the real lcm home (LCM_HOME, default ~/.lossless-claude):

• Phases that write memory (compact, sensitive, mcp) touch only the current project, or add and then remove their own entries. A run costs one project's summarization and keeps every existing summary; --all and --restart stay out of this skill.
• integrity only reads, across the whole home.
• lcm doctor (in health, and lcm_doctor in mcp) writes outside the project: it repairs lcm's own setup when it finds it drifted: the hooks and MCP entries in ~/.claude/settings.json, ~/.claude/lcm.md, a stale daemon. Each repair prints as a fixed warning; record it in the scorecard as a finding, since a live install that needed one had drifted.

Binary: lcm on PATH. Record each check as PASS, FAIL or SKIP (with the reason), keep going on FAIL, and open an issue for each failure worth tracking. The daemon log is logs/daemon.log in the lcm home, one JSON record per line; docs/configuration.md ("Daemon log") names its events.

Phases

health: lcm --version, lcm status, lcm doctor. Done when the version equals package.json, the daemon is up on this project, and every doctor check passes or its warning (or repair) is recorded. The daemon-log check covers errors and continuity in the daemon log.

The running daemon's log level decides what capture and compact can find. The daemon reads daemon.logLevel from config.json in the lcm home only when it starts, so when that file is newer than the last daemon.start record, run lcm daemon restart first. The level in the file is then the running one; a missing or unrecognised value means info.

• debug or info: every log check runs.
• warn: mark the checks for info records (the /prompt-search request, compact.done, compact.skipped) SKIP with that reason; summarizer.fallback is a warn record and is still checked.
• error: mark those and the summarizer.fallback check SKIP.

capture: the plugin's hooks reaching the daemon from this session. To find this session's id, echo a unique marker (such as dogfood- plus the epoch seconds) in one command, then, in the next, search this project's directory under ~/.claude/projects/ recursively for *.jsonl files containing it. The one file that holds it is this session's transcript, and its name without .jsonl is the session id. Done when the daemon log holds a request record for POST /prompt-search with status 200, cwd equal to this project and session_id equal to this session's id.

import: lcm import --dry-run --verbose. Done when it lists this project's sessions and lcm status shows the same message count before and after.

compact: note the time and the Summaries and Promoted counts lcm status shows for this project, then lcm compact, which compacts the current project and then promotes. The summarizer is an LLM call; allow five minutes. Done when:

• a second identical run creates nothing;
• either lcm compact printed that there was nothing to compact (it then sends no request, so the log has no record), or the daemon log holds a compact.done or compact.skipped record for this project written after the noted time;
• every summarizer.fallback record from that interval is noted in the scorecard with its reason;
• lcm status afterwards shows this project's Summaries count higher than before when the log holds a compact.done for this run, and unchanged otherwise; Promoted is never lower than before. lcm stats totals every project, so it cannot confirm one project's counts.

sensitive: list, add, test and remove, from lcm help sensitive. It writes the real pattern list, so remove every pattern you add. purge deletes stored memory, so this skill never runs it. Done when a built-in secret and a pattern you added are both [REDACTED] by lcm sensitive test, and your pattern is gone from lcm sensitive list.

mcp: docs/agent-tools.md is the contract. Done when every tool it lists has been called with a documented parameter set and answered in the documented shape, including an lcm_store followed by an lcm_search that finds it. Skip lcm_expand and lcm_describe only when no summary id exists yet.

integrity: node .claude/skills/lcm-dogfood/scripts/db-integrity.js, which checks every project database read-only; on a large home it takes minutes. Done when it prints N of N project databases ok.

Scorecard

One row per phase run: checks, PASS, FAIL, SKIP. For each FAIL: the error, the daemon log records around it, the suggested fix. Done when every phase you ran has a row.