DonchitosandClaude Opus 5.5
be8993bbc5
Fix release for 1.1.2: the 14 longest skills keep their later phases after a compaction, a question nobody answered is never taken as an answer, settings read the same from a subfolder, the commit check works for a project in a subfolder of a larger repository, every skill opens with a title, and the shipped allow rules no longer approve deleting a branch or writing files without asking. Details in CHANGELOG.md; upgrade steps in UPGRADING.md (v1.1.2 → v1.1.3). Refs #83 Refs #133 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0185en4t76fPn7315q4c3nko
3.3 KiB
Error Recovery Protocol
Shared procedure for any skill that spawns agents via the Agent tool, used by
the ## Error Recovery Protocol section of each orchestration and review skill.
Two imperatives apply to all of them: surface a blocked agent immediately, and
produce a partial report. Each skill's own Common blockers list is
skill-specific and is not repeated here.
Trigger 0 — verify the artifact before reading the response
Before applying anything below, and before treating a phase as complete: if the return contract named a path, check that the path exists. A named artifact that is not on disk is a FAILED PHASE, no matter how the agent's response reads.
This trigger exists because the three below are not sufficient. They fire on BLOCKED, on an error, and on "cannot complete" — and an agent can fail in a way that is none of those. A parallel agent can do a lot of work and then return a single fluent preamble — "I'll verify the build infrastructure…" — with no path, no summary, no BLOCKED item, and no file written. Nothing in steps 1–4 matches that shape. An orchestrator reading the transcript sees a plausible response and advances, and half a parallel phase disappears with no signal at all.
The work is usually not lost. Resume the agent with an explicit "you did not honour the return contract" message. Its investigation is still in context, so it only has to do the write-and-return step it skipped. So the recovery is cheap; the detection is the hard part, and the detection cannot come from reading the response.
A fluent response is not evidence that a phase ran. The artifact is — observe the artifact, not the transcript. The rule applies to sub-agents exactly as it does to skills.
When the path is missing:
- Do not advance the pipeline or summarise the phase as done.
- Resume the agent, naming the unmet contract explicitly and telling it that "I could not write" is a valid answer but silence is not. Prefer resuming over re-spawning — the context is usually still there, and a re-spawn pays for the whole investigation again.
- If the second attempt also produces nothing, treat it as BLOCKED and apply steps 1–5 below.
If any spawned agent returns BLOCKED, errors, or cannot complete:
- Surface immediately — report "[AgentName]: BLOCKED — [reason]" to the user before continuing to dependent phases. The reason names what is missing and where it was expected (the path or the input), so the user can supply it.
- Assess dependencies — check whether the blocked agent's output is required by subsequent phases. If yes, do not proceed past that dependency point without user input.
- Offer options via
AskUserQuestion:- Skip this agent and note the gap in the final report — never fill the skipped agent's section with content of your own
- Retry with narrower scope
- Stop here and resolve the blocker first
- Always produce a partial report — output whatever was completed. Never discard work because one agent blocked.
- A skip does not clear the block. In a
/team-*pipeline, choosing "skip this agent and note the gap" lets the remaining phases run, but the skipped agent's work is missing from what the pipeline delivers: the final verdict is BLOCKED, naming the skipped agent and its gap — never COMPLETE.