Conflicting env-setting mechanism

[smolcompute]

Going through the how-to-smart.md steps, the process stumbles at step 6.

Why does the settings.json file have this env section ? We've already set these in our shell and .env file. This introduces potential conflict as seems to be the came here with "PAI_DIR": "$HOME/.claude"

Also, following the instructions as they are right now, claude fails to recognize PAI despite the symlink to the settings being placed in ~/.claude.

  "env": {
    "MCP_API_KEY": "REDACTED",
    "DISABLE_INTERLEAVED_THINKING": "true",
    "DA": "Kai",
    "PAI_DIR": "$HOME/.claude"
  },

[evenromo]

Ive had some issues with dynamically loaded paths like $HOME/.claude. I would test using absolute paths rather than dynamic ones. Like this: /home/yourusername/.claude/ or maybe the ~/.claude way.

[danielmiessler]

I added it because it was required. It wasn't reading the environment variables correctly.