GPT-5 finding
Persist step attempts restore from non-existent .bak; no pre-write backup created (risk of state loss)
highdata-losshigh
- skills/fork-release-tracker/SKILL.md:181-192
- skills/fork-release-tracker/SKILL.md:194-195
The snippet overwrites the state file before validation and only then runs jq empty. On failure, it tries to restore from memory/topics/fork-release-state.json.bak, but no backup file is created anywhere in the flow, so restore will also fail. This can leave a corrupted or missing state file, breaking dedup and causing repeated announcements.
Recommendation
Write to a temp file and validate before replacing the live state, and create/rotate a backup only after successful validation: e.g., - Produce $TMP - if ! jq empty "$TMP"; then rm "$TMP"; log and exit ERROR; fi - cp -f memory/topics/fork-release-state.json memory/topics/fork-release-state.json.bak 2>/dev/null || true - mv "$TMP" memory/topics/fork-release-state.json Also consider fsync or atomic moves if available.