[deanrie]

Problem

Both hooks read the frontmatter of .cursor/ralph/scratchpad.md with sed -n '/^---$/,/^---$/...'. A sed range reopens at every later ---, so a Markdown rule in the prompt body starts a second "frontmatter" block. The stop hook also rebuilt the prompt with awk '/^---$/{i++; next} i>=2', which drops every --- line, and bumped the counter with sed "s/^iteration: .*/..." over the whole file.

With a prompt that contains rules (a pasted spec with --- separators is the common case):

• every --- line disappears from the followup on each iteration;
• a frontmatter-like block quoted in the body (for example a task that says "write a SKILL.md that starts with --- name: x ... ---", or any body line beginning with iteration: after a rule) leaks into the parsed frontmatter; iteration then reads as 1\n<body line>, fails the numeric check, and the stop hook reports "state file corrupted" and deletes the loop.

Fix

• Frontmatter is the block between the opening --- on line 1 and the first closing --- (awk with an exit at the first close), in both hooks.
• The followup body is everything after that first closing ---, verbatim.
• The iteration: rewrite is limited to the frontmatter.

Tests

ralph-loop/tests/body-separators.test.sh (standalone bash, same shape as the tests in #1000): a body with two rules and an iteration: phrase, then a body with a quoted frontmatter block. Against the hooks on main 3 of 12 checks fail (both rules lost; quoted block stops the loop and deletes the state file); 12/12 with this branch, on macOS (BSD awk) and in debian:bookworm-slim (mawk 1.3.4). node scripts/validate-plugins.mjs passes.

Merges cleanly onto main (git merge-tree). It touches lines adjacent to #1000 (dependency guards and missing-key handling), so the two conflict textually; whichever lands second gets rebased, the logic is independent.