/insights: qualitative facet analysis stops regenerating for new sessions, silently degrading report to empty narrative sections

Environment

• Claude Code version: 2.1.198 (Homebrew Cask install)
• OS: macOS (Darwin 25.5.0)

Summary

/insights has two data pipelines feeding the generated HTML report:

• ~/.claude/usage-data/session-meta/*.json — cheap, mechanically-extracted per-session stats (message counts, tool counts, tokens, etc.)
• ~/.claude/usage-data/facets/*.json — LLM-generated qualitative per-session analysis (goal, outcome, satisfaction, friction, summary), which powers the narrative/insight sections of the report

session-meta/ regenerates correctly on every /insights run. facets/ has stopped regenerating for new sessions: all 52 files (and the directory mtime itself) are frozen at Jun 24 19:48, despite /insights being run again on Jul 7 and adding 131 new session-meta files for sessions in that window. No new facet files were written, and no error was surfaced to the user.

Impact

1. The report's narrative/insight sections render empty (no goals, outcomes, friction, or satisfaction analysis) despite 124 analyzed sessions being claimed in the report header.
2. The report's nav bar hardcodes anchor links to 8 sections (#section-work, #section-usage, #section-wins, #section-friction, #section-features, #section-patterns, #section-horizon, #section-feedback) regardless of whether the corresponding content block was emitted. Since the facet-dependent sections have no data, their id="section-*" targets are never emitted, so those nav links are dead — clicking them does nothing.
3. The user sees "0 insights generated" (or an empty narrative) with no indication that this is due to a stalled background pipeline rather than genuinely having nothing to report.

Steps to reproduce

1. Run /insights regularly over an extended period (in this case, daily use since at least May 2026).
2. At some point (here, after Jun 24) the facet-generation step appears to stop running for new sessions — cause unknown from the outside, since /insights has no accessible/inspectable source on disk (compiled into the binary).
3. Continue using Claude Code normally and running /insights periodically. session-meta/ keeps growing; facets/ does not.
4. Open the generated report: narrative sections are empty, several nav links go nowhere.

Expected behavior

• Either: the facet-generation pass keeps pace with new sessions the same way session-meta extraction does, OR
• If facet generation is skipped/throttled/rate-limited for some reason, the report should say so explicitly instead of silently rendering with empty sections and dead nav anchors.
• Nav links should only render for sections that actually have content, or the section should render a "not enough data" placeholder rather than being omitted entirely.

What I checked before filing

• Confirmed via file timestamps that facets/ has been untouched since Jun 24 19:48 while session-meta/ correctly gained 131 new files on Jul 7.
• Ruled out permissions (normal drwxr-xr-x, correct owner) and disk space (75% used, 95Gi free) as causes.
• Checked the CHANGELOG for anthropics/claude-code from the installed version (2.1.198) through the latest (2.1.204) — no entry references facets, insights report generation, or this symptom. The only insights-related historical entry (2.1.149, a crash fix for missing optional fields in cached session-meta) is unrelated and already superseded.