Real pain isn't repo count — it's symlink-drift between machines. The ~/.claude/skills symlink on Mac mini was pointing at a stale clone for ~1 month, causing skill drift.
Compared in-session skills inventory vs the canonical claude-skills repo. Found drift. Traced root cause to symlink path mismatch.
Symlink-drift across machines is the underlying pain; a whole-tree skills symlink in the new monorepo would replicate the failure. [upgrade-signal:gap] Preserve setup-skills.sh per-skill wiring; gitignore machine-local state files (open_issues.jsonl, audit_log.jsonl).
{"from":"listener","to":"all","action":"surfaced symlink-drift as the actual pain (not repo count)","multiplier":3,"base":1,"score":3,"reason":"without this, 1-repo plan inherits same failure mode"}
1-repo monorepo plan must explicitly handle the skills directory: not a flat symlink. Use bootstrap script that re-wires per-skill symlinks on every checkout.
Now treats 'is the symlink fresh' as the same class of question as 'is the lockfile current'.