Hit Error while Parsing PRD and ended up parsing wrong document

[Optiknerd]

Issue: task-master parse-prd sending raw binary .docx content to API instead of extracted text
Command run:
bashtask-master parse-prd Strategyn_Scraper_PRD.docx
Two bugs observed:

Wrong file parsing — Instead of extracting text from the .docx, task-master sent the raw binary ZIP/XML content of the file directly to the Anthropic API as the PRD text (visible in the error log as PK\u0003\u0004... — that's a ZIP file header).
Invalid API key error — The API calls returned 401 authentication_error: invalid x-api-key, yet the task generation still "succeeded" and produced 11 tasks — meaning it either used a fallback or the tasks were generated incorrectly without actual PRD content.

Expected behavior: task-master should extract readable text from the .docx before sending it to the API.
Questions:

How do I correctly point task-master at a specific PRD file path?
Is there a flag to pre-convert the .docx to text, or does task-master need a .txt/.md file instead?
Why did it report success ("11 tasks generated") despite API auth failures?

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Full error output - (https://www.notion.so/Taskmaster-claude-code-bug-314e1e4197fb8032b9f3f731f2a0b1cd?source=copy_link)

[Optiknerd]

just discovered something that I had not noticed. I got claude to produce the PRD and it gave it to me in .... .docx format, which did not notice. Claude just confirmed that was not best practice and NOT what he had done for me on other requests.

So this is not exactly a bug because the format of the PRD did not conform with the ones allowed.
Would be great if format checking to avoid this error because I did not notice that it had gone haywire and I ended up executing the entire task list which seems to have built a routine to parse a PRD.
Very wacky that it went and found a different PRD to parse though.

[Crunchyman-ralph]

😂 that's funny, honestly this is one of those things where it's the non-deterministic AI acting.

how many times were you able to produce this issue ?

[Optiknerd]

😂 that's funny, honestly this is one of those things where it's the non-deterministic AI acting.

how many times were you able to produce this issue ?

I did not try to repeat it. It was my mistake for using a pdf. gets expensive if you reproduce stuff anyway. ;-(

[Crunchyman-ralph]

you used a pdf ? there's your issue, we don't even support parsing a prd from a pdf