Failure triage

Skill yeaight7/agent-powerups/skills/failure-triage

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Install

npx -y skills add yeaight7/agent-powerups --skill failure-triage

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

6 stars6 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.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Use when confronted with an unknown failure in CI or production, before committing to a deep debugging approach.

SKILL.md

2.4 KB, 533 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Purpose

Before diving deep into a stack trace or spending hours reproducing a bug, triage it to determine the blast radius, subsystem, and debugging approach. Do not start writing fixes until you have explicitly stated your triage hypothesis and confirmed the category.

When to Use

A CI job or production system is failing and the cause is unknown
A bug report arrives without a clear owner or subsystem
Before choosing between deep debugging, bisecting, or reproduction work

Inputs

The failure signal: stack trace, CI log excerpt, or error report
The repo, for recent-change inspection

Workflow

Categorize the failure:
- Syntax/Build error — fails before running
- Logic error — runs, but produces wrong output
- Infrastructure/Environment error — network timeout, missing DB table
- Flaky/Non-deterministic error — fails sometimes
Locate the origin. Scan the stack trace. Ignore framework/library internals. Find the highest frame that belongs to the first-party application code:
```
# surface first-party frames (adjust the path filter to the repo layout)
grep -n "src/" stacktrace.txt | head -20
```

Check recent changes. Most bugs are in the newest code:

git log -n 5 --oneline
git diff HEAD~5 --stat
git log -n 10 --oneline -- <suspect-file-or-dir>

Formulate a hypothesis. State clearly: "I suspect this is an environment error caused by missing configuration, originating in src/config.ts."

Output

A stated category (build / logic / environment / flaky)
The suspected origin file or subsystem
An explicit triage hypothesis, before any fix is attempted

Verification

Failure assigned to exactly one category
Origin frame identified in first-party code, not framework internals
Recent commits checked for related changes
Hypothesis stated explicitly before any fix was written

Failure Modes

Fixing before triaging — patching the symptom at the crash site while the root cause lives elsewhere.
Blaming the framework — the highest first-party frame is the lead; library internals rarely are.
Skipping recent history — git log is the cheapest triage tool available; check it before anything expensive.

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.

Gives 1 of the 12 instructions most debug triage skills give in 533 tokens

Counted across 839 of the 1,149 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-08-07

investigate root cause before proposing any fixin 102 of 839, across 67 files
read error messages completelyin 89 of 839, across 49 files
create a failing test case before fixingin 84 of 839, across 46 files
reproduce the issue consistentlyin 82 of 839, across 41 files
change one variable at a timein 82 of 839, across 42 files
check recent changeshere, and in 74 of 839, across 36 files
write the regression test before fixingin 74 of 839, across 40 files
fix the root cause not the symptomin 60 of 839, across 45 files
implement a single fix at a timein 59 of 839, across 20 files
trace data flow backward to the sourcein 50 of 839, across 20 files
remove all debug instrumentationin 49 of 839, across 13 files
form a single hypothesisin 48 of 839, across 18 files

Said here and by no other author read

find the highest first-party stack frame
ignore framework and library internals in the stack trace
state the triage hypothesis before writing a fix
assign the failure to exactly one category
state the suspected origin file or subsystem

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.