how to debug 'skill name must be lowercase kebab-case under 64 chars' validation error in SKILL.md

By Sai Kiran Pandrala · Last verified: 2026-05-31 · Source: vendor status pages and changelogs, community forums (r/nocode, r/automation, r/GoogleAppsScript, r/PowerAutomate, r/n8n, r/make, r/ClaudeAI), in-product help, vendor help centers

how to debug 'skill name must be lowercase kebab-case under 64 chars' validation error in SKILL.md on Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 comes up often enough in the r/nocode, r/claude, and adjacent automation communities that there is a stable fix pattern. The pattern I see most often is in Make for exactly this reason - last Tuesday I was mid-build for a client when this exact thing hit me, and the recovery path is mostly known, the vendor help just buries it under three layers of marketing copy.

Confirm it stuck

On Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 in my experience the most useful first-pass tools are Anthropic skill-creator skill from anthropics/skills repo, claudelog or CLAUDE_LOG_LEVEL=debug env var output, VS Code YAML extension for SKILL.md frontmatter validation. Each of these surfaces a different layer of the failure - keep at least the first one in your personal notes so the next time this happens you do not start cold.

For verification on Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026, the methods that survive contact with a real Monday-morning workload are test -f .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md && head -20 to inspect frontmatter and wc -c on description value to assert under 1024 characters. Anything less than that and you are shipping on vibes.

Authoritative sources for Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 that I cross-reference before committing to a fix: github.com/anthropics/skills, code.claude.com/docs/en/skills, platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/agent-skills/best-practices. Marketing blog posts and Medium writeups are signal, not ground truth.

The rest of this page is the structured fix path. Start with diagnose, then remediation, then the automation options so you do not have to do this by hand the next time it surfaces. Verify and safety sections at the end are the discipline that keeps the fix from regressing the next time you open the platform.

Spot the symptom

Third pass: read the HTTP status code and the in-product error message like an x-ray of your Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 session. 4xx is something on your side (auth, scope, payload, sharing), 5xx is theirs (or a shared infra fault). 401 = signed-in session expired or the wrong account is active, 403 = you are signed in but the connector is bound to a different identity, 404 = the URL points to a deleted or moved object, 409 = another run is touching the same record at the same time, 422 = the payload validates against schema but fails a workspace rule (required field, locked field, custom validation), 429 = rate limit on the trigger source or destination API, 5xx = retry after a minute. Cross-reference the in-product error string against the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 help center because the same "something went wrong" toast can mean five different things on a single page. If the same action cycles between 429 and 503 over a tight loop, the API quota on the trigger source is exhausted - slow the scenario down or split it into batches.

Second pass: open the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 workspace admin or settings panel and look at the audit log or activity feed for the failing window. Most modern automation platforms surface an audit trail (the platform's execution history, the connector run log, the integration activity feed). The audit log tells you whether the failure was your action, a teammate changing a connected account in the same minute, or a platform-side rollout. Many "permission denied" or "connection not found" reports trace to a credential-level change pushed in the same admin panel in the previous hour - the audit trail makes that obvious without guesswork.

Fourth: open the vendor status page for Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 and the connector's upstream status pages for the failing window. The smoking guns are an open incident touching the exact service area you are using, a recent post-mortem covering the same symptom, or a Trust Center advisory on a partial outage. Cross-reference the timestamp of your first failed run against the incident start time - if they match within 5 minutes, stop debugging your own setup and subscribe to the incident updates. Many vendors lag the status page behind the actual incident by 10 to 30 minutes; if Twitter and Reddit are both lit up but the status page is green, trust the crowd and treat it as upstream until proven otherwise.

Field notes from real Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 incidents

Vendor docs at code.claude.com/docs/en/skills are a starting point for Agentic AI questions, not the truth. The community threads are where the real edge cases land. After any change to an Claude Code Skills automation I run `claude /agents and confirm the skill appears with correct description` to confirm the run actually held, two seconds, one call, zero ambiguity.

The Agentic AI space inside Claude Code Skills changes fast enough that a Stack Overflow answer from 18 months ago is already half wrong, check the dates before you trust the snippet. Before I mark an Claude Code Skills ticket resolved I always run `claude --dangerously-skip-permissions OFF and invoke skill via natural language prompt` once more and screenshot the output, that habit has caught at least three silent regressions for me.

Tools I actually reach for

For most Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 stalls I start with VS Code YAML extension for SKILL.md frontmatter validation, fall back to claudelog or CLAUDE_LOG_LEVEL=debug env var output, claude --debug verbose startup log showing loaded skills, git diff on .claude/skills/ for review before commit when VS Code YAML extension for SKILL.md frontmatter validation cannot surface the answer, and keep Anthropic skill-creator skill from anthropics/skills repo handy for the cases where neither answers. That ordering is not academic - it matches the layers of the failure as they tend to surface, so the cheapest signal lands first and the heavier tooling only comes out when the simpler answer does not hold up. My muscle-memory shortcut for this is to run the first tool while the failing screen is still open, not after I have already restarted the platform.

Verification I run before I call it fixed

Before I mark a Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 stall resolved, the verification loop below is what I actually run. Each step proves a different layer is green, and the order matters - the cheaper checks gate the more expensive ones.

claude --dangerously-skip-permissions OFF and invoke skill via natural language prompt

If that one comes back clean, move to the next check. If it does not, stop and dig in there before layering more verification on top of a red signal.

test -f .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md && head -20 to inspect frontmatter

If that one comes back clean, move to the next check. If it does not, stop and dig in there before layering more verification on top of a red signal.

wc -c on description value to assert under 1024 characters

Only when every line above runs clean do I close the loop and update my notes with the timestamps.

Where I check first when the docs disagree

When two sources contradict each other on a Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 detail, the disambiguation order I lean on is stable. I usually check github.com/anthropics/skills for the ground-truth view on this part of Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026. I usually check code.claude.com/docs/en/skills for the ground-truth view on this part of Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026. I usually check platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/agent-skills/best-practices for the ground-truth view on this part of Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026. Marketing blog posts and Medium writeups are signal, not ground truth, and I treat them as such until the references above either confirm or contradict the claim.

Solution-focused remediation path

Before any destructive step on a Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 workspace, slow down and stage rollback. Snapshot the current platform version, the current workspace settings (Settings -> screenshot every tab), the connected-apps list, the current sharing policy, and the current member list to a notes entry first. Capture the failing screenshot, the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 incident id if any, and the timestamp window. Photograph (screenshot) the workspace state from two angles: the scenario or script that is failing, and the workspace settings page that controls the relevant policy. Then do the destructive step (revoke a connector, change a sharing default, remove a member, delete a connected app) inside a test workspace or a test scenario first, never the whole workspace. Capture the platform version, the API permissions, the connected-app list, the workspace member roster, and the relevant integration log snapshot to your notes before the destructive step. Decision point: if you are on a paid plan, the cheapest correct path is almost always to open the in-product support chat in parallel with the rollback - the support rep can confirm whether a vendor-side rollout is responsible while you are still staging the change, which avoids a needless workspace edit if the fix is server-side.

When the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 fault tracks to integration failures, automation delays, or webhook drops from the trigger source (the trigger source, the connector, the upstream provider), treat the integration plane as suspect. Open the integration log in the connected service (the trigger source's webhook log, the platform's connector run history) and read the response status the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 endpoint actually returned - most "scenario not firing" reports are actually "webhook firing but the connector failed and the platform backed off." Verify the connected account is still authorized (the OAuth grant in Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 is not silently revoked) and that the trigger event is what you think it is. Decision point: if the trigger is firing but Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 is rate-limiting it, throttle the scenario (bump the polling interval, add a sleep module, enable batch mode) and re-run. Verify the connected workspace is the right workspace - a common foot-gun is the personal workspace being authorized while the work workspace holds the data.

Start by sorting the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 failure into one of three buckets, because roughly 80% of cases fall here. Bucket one is auth / account drift: you are signed into the wrong account, the SSO session expired, MFA tripped, or the workspace owner changed your role. Bucket two is sync / cache drift: the platform has a stale view of the connector, the offline cache disagrees with the cloud, or a recent edit has not synced yet. Bucket three is plan / quota / sharing: the action requires a higher plan tier, the workspace hit an operation or task cap, or the connector you are trying to use was revoked. Pick the bucket first, then act. Before you act, capture a baseline screenshot of the failing run plus the run id so you can prove whether the fix actually moved the needle. Decision point: if the failure is intermittent and you are on a paid Business / Enterprise plan, open the in-product support chat first - vendor support on a paid tenant beats hours of speculative debugging on cost and on liability if the failure recurs.

Automate this fix so you do not do it twice

Fleet API token + OAuth grant rotation via vendor admin

Rotating a personal access token on one Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 workspace by hand is fine; rotating across a team of workspaces is how you end up with twelve different tokens, four expired ones, and an unknown blast radius. Drive rotation through the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 admin SDK or REST under a service account with the rotation scope only, store the new token in a personal password manager (1Password, Bitwarden, vendor secrets manager) with versioning enabled, and roll the consumer scripts one workspace at a time with a health check between each. Pin the API version explicitly during rotation so a coincident vendor rollout does not look like a rotation failure.

# Rotate the platform API token (regenerate via the admin UI, capture in 1Password)
op item create --vault Work --category "API Credential" \ --title "claude platform token 2026-05-31" \ password="$NEW_PLATFORM_TOKEN" notes="Rotated $(date -Iseconds)"
# Capture the old token as deprecated so cutover is reversible
op item create --vault Work --category "API Credential" \ --title "claude platform token OLD 2026-05-31" \ password="$OLD_PLATFORM_TOKEN" notes="Old token marked deprecated"

Multi-workspace rate-limit + retry policy via shared client wrapper

When the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 integration runs across multiple workspaces or accounts, every consumer needs the same backoff, jitter, and idempotency behavior or one noisy workspace will starve the rest. Wrap the vendor SDK or fetch call in a thin client that reads the rate-limit headers (X-RateLimit-Remaining, Retry-After, x-ratelimit-reset), applies full jitter (base 200ms, cap 30s, max 5 retries), and de-dupes writes by a stable key (the platform's run id, the connector's external id, the destination record id). Emit simple log lines tagged with the workspace id so a quota burst on one workspace shows up in the same log as the downstream cascade.

# Python - claude API wrapper with full-jitter retry
from tenacity import retry, wait_random_exponential, stop_after_attempt, retry_if_exception_type
import requests class RateLimited(Exception): pass @retry( wait=wait_random_exponential(multiplier=0.2, max=30), stop=stop_after_attempt(5), retry=retry_if_exception_type(RateLimited),
)
def call_claude(method, path, token, payload=None): r = requests.request(method, f"https://api.example.com{path}", headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"}, json=payload, timeout=10) if r.status_code == 429: raise RateLimited(r.headers.get("Retry-After")) r.raise_for_status() return r.json()

Codify the platform version pin and rollback as a single notes entry

Once a stable platform version is identified for the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026, write the version string, the build hash, and the workspace policy state to a personal notes entry with the date in the title. Reproducible rollback is then a single download-and-install plus a sign-in. Pin the workspace policy state explicitly so a vendor-side default change does not silently shift behavior under you. Stage the notes entry next to a checklist that lists the failing screenshot, the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 incident id (if any), and the support case number; the second time the workflow breaks at 9 a.m. you do not want to be rediscovering which platform build was actually green.

# Personal notes template (claude)
Date: 2026-05-31
Platform: claude
Working build: 2.45.1 (Build hash: a1b2c3d)
Account: [email protected]
Workspace: ws-prod-claude
Failing screenshot: ~/notes/claude-2026-05-31.png
Support case: SUPP-claude-12345
Rollback path: download installer from vendor releases page, sign out, reinstall, sign back in

Pitfalls

The deepest trap with Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 workflows is treating a recurring class of failure as a one-off incident. A connector hang or a sharing 403 burst gets papered over with a sign-out / sign-in or a re-auth, the platform runs for two weeks, and the exact same signature returns because the root cause was never identified. Codify every case in a personal notes entry, save the working platform version (the About panel) in the same note, and write the exact workspace settings, sharing policy, and connected-apps list into a checklist. After any major platform update on Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 review the workspace settings and the connected-apps grants explicitly, since vendors silently grant or revoke permissions between major releases.

The second half of this pitfall is confirming the fix on a single device when the team is identical. If you and three teammates use the same Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 workspace on the same plan, a vendor-side rollout tends to bite a whole batch within the same hour. Verify on every device and account that touches the failing workflow, log the result and the platform version per attempt, and only then declare the class closed.

Full fix path

• Reproduce the original failing run against Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 on the same device AND a second device with the same account. If the failing toast or error code still surfaces on any device, you have not fixed it.
• Watch for 24 to 48 hours via the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 workspace audit log + the integration history + your personal notes. Cached error states and CDN caches mask slow-burn drift and intermittent regional issues.
• Smoke-test under realistic load: replay the workflow against a test workspace for at least 30 minutes at your normal working pace, log success / error and the timestamp per attempt to a notes file.
• Capture the new state in a personal notes entry so the next time this happens you do not rediscover it. Note platform version + workspace policy + connected-apps list + failing screenshot + verbatim error string + fix applied. Push to a shared team wiki if your team uses one.
• If the fix involved an API token rotation or a workspace policy change, commit the new token to your password manager and screenshot the workspace settings for archival.

Safety, rollback, blast radius

• Test in a Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 test workspace or on a duplicate scenario first before any change that touches the real workspace. Snapshot the platform version, the workspace settings, the connected-apps list, and the sharing policy before changing anything.
• Apply the principle of least surprise when granting share access or connected-app permissions. Review the share list against the people who actually need access - extra shares are extra blast radius.
• Use idempotent runs where the Claude Code Skills - SKILL.md Authoring and Composition - 2026 API supports it (the platform's run id de-dupe, external id keys on destination records) so a retried run does not create duplicate records.
• Know your rollback path. Platform version rollback is a one-line download-and-install; an API token rotation is reversible if you kept the old token in the password manager during cutover; a workspace policy change is reversible only if you saved the previous policy in a screenshot.
• For team-wide or workspace-wide changes, line up a maintenance window with team notification before pushing through the admin console.

FAQ

Related fixes

Related guides worth a look while you sort this one out:

• how to distribute a skill pack as a Claude Code plugin under plugins/ /skills/
• how to structure a .claude/skills/ /SKILL.md with valid YAML frontmatter for name and description fields
• how to add a references/ directory to a skill so Claude loads docs on demand instead of at startup
• how to chain a skill that invokes another skill via the Task tool with permissionMode acceptEdits
• how to design a skill that triggers only when description keywords match user intent
• how to fix Claude Code skill not auto-loading because description field exceeds 1024 character limit