SkillIndexEnrichmentService fails silently — trigger phrase cache always empty

[Aaronontheweb]

Problem

SkillIndexEnrichmentService is supposed to produce rich per-skill trigger phrases via an LLM sidecar call at daemon startup: 5–15 word descriptions in user language that help the agent match a task to a relevant skill. Without enrichment, the compressed skill index falls back to the first 60 characters of each skill's description (src/Netclaw.Actors/Skills/SkillRegistry.cs:191-193), which is often too terse for the model to reason over.

Evidence it never runs successfully:

• ~/.netclaw/cache/skill-index/ directory is empty — zero cached trigger phrases.
• Daemon log has no "Skill index enrichment complete" messages anywhere in recent logs.
• Sidecar failures inside TryGenerateBatchAsync log only at _logger.LogDebug level (src/Netclaw.Daemon/Services/SkillIndexEnrichmentService.cs:155,161), so any failure is invisible unless logging is set to Debug.
• _clientProvider is null also returns silently without logging (line 123).

Impact

The agent operates on truncated descriptions rather than purpose-written trigger phrases. This likely contributes to observed grounding failures — e.g. a 20-turn session on C# terminal-library work where the agent guessed skill_load("dotnet"), failed, then picked aspire-development-workflow from the error list. A properly enriched skill index would have surfaced akka-best-practices / csharp-coding-standards / etc. (once those are also loaded via the marketplace fix).

Fix

1. Raise failure logging to LogWarning — a silent degradation to truncated descriptions should be visible to operators.
2. Log explicitly when _clientProvider is null at startup so DI-wiring regressions are caught.
3. Verify IChatClientProvider is actually registered in DI by the time SkillIndexEnrichmentService.StartAsync runs.
4. Add a diagnostic status field or netclaw doctor check that reports the enrichment state (cached / in-progress / failed / never-ran).
5. Investigate whether the 30-second timeout at SidecarTimeout is too tight for batches of ~60 skills — if so, batch in chunks.

Related

Discovered while investigating netclaw stats Skills loaded: 0 under milestone 0.12. Once the marketplace-path fix lands, the skill count grows from ~62 to ~95, making enrichment reliability more critical.