working-in-scratch-areas

What problem does it solve?

This Skill prevents cluttering your repositories with temporary files, ensuring one-off scripts, debug tools, and temporary documentation are saved to persistent, organized scratch areas. It helps you avoid accidental commits and maintains a clean, focused project codebase, saving you time and reducing complexity.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Persistent Scratch Areas: Automatically saves temporary work to a dedicated, git-ignored .scratch/ directory that survives repository moves or deletions.
• Structured Organization: Enforces the use of topic-specific subdirectories with README.md files for context, keeping all related temporary files grouped, documented, and easy to find later.
• Automated Script Setup: Provides a helper script to make new scratch scripts executable while validating shebangs, ensuring proper execution and security without manual chmod commands.
• Use Case: When debugging a critical production issue, use this skill to create a .scratch/database-debug/ subdirectory, write a check-connections.sh script, and document your findings in a README.md, all without polluting the main codebase or risking accidental commits.

Quick Start

Use the working-in-scratch-areas skill to create a new subdirectory called 'api-investigation' in the current repository's scratch area. Then, create a bash script named 'check-latency.sh' inside it to ping the '/api/v1/health' endpoint 5 times.