Fix flaky test
Use when a ticket reports an intermittently failing test — passes sometimes, fails others, or fails in CI but not locally. Invoke for "this test is flaky", "fix the intermittent failure in X", or "the suite is non-deterministic". Fix the root cause, never paper over it with a retry.From its SKILL.md
npx -y skills add tmj-90/gaffer --skill fix-flaky-testAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
One thing to look at
- 0 stars0 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.
SKILL.md
2.0 KB, 421 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it
Fix a flaky test
A flaky test fails non-deterministically. The job is to find the source of non-determinism and remove it — not to retry until it passes.
Steps
- Reproduce the flakiness. Run the named test repeatedly (a loop, or the runner's repeat flag) and, where relevant, in randomised order. Capture a failing run; you can't fix what you can't observe.
- Locate the non-determinism. It's almost always one of: timing (sleeps, races, unawaited async), test order / shared mutable state (leaked globals, DB rows, singletons), unseeded randomness, real clock/timezone, or network/external calls. Read the failure to narrow which.
- Fix the root cause. Await async properly and wait on conditions not timeouts; isolate state with proper setup/teardown; seed randomness and fake the clock; stub the external boundary. Do not add a retry, increase a sleep, or mark the test skipped — those hide the bug.
- Prove stability. Re-run the test many times (and in random order) and confirm it
passes every time. Then run the full suite (
run-tests) to confirm no regression. - Evidence: the repeated-run command and a clean streak, plus the fix summary. Then
use the
record-evidenceskill to recordtest_outputagainst the AC and submit for review.
Rules
- Fix the cause (timing/order/shared state/randomness), never add a retry or longer sleep.
- Never skip or delete the test to make the suite green.
- Demonstrate stability with many repeated passes, not a single run.
- If the flake reveals a real product bug, note it; fix only what the ticket scopes.
- Run on a branch (the
create-branchskill), never a protected branch.
What ships with it
Read from the repository
Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.