Agent Skills: Damage Control

Table of Contents

• Overview
• When To Use
• When NOT To Use
• Damage Triage
• Module Reference
• Integration Pattern
• Exit Criteria

Damage Control

Overview

Provides recovery protocols for agents that encounter broken state mid-session. Damage control covers four failure classes: agent crashes with partial work on disk, context window overflow that causes state loss, merge conflicts blocking forward progress, and general session state corruption requiring reconciliation.

The skill does not prevent failures. It defines what to do after one has already happened, so recovery is consistent, auditable, and does not silently discard work.

When To Use

• An agent process crashed and left files in an unknown state
• A session hit the context limit and cannot load prior decisions
• git merge or git rebase produced conflicts the agent cannot resolve automatically
• Observed state (files on disk, task list, git index) disagrees with expected state
• A downstream agent reports missing artifacts that should have been produced upstream

When NOT to Use

• Proactive risk assessment before work starts (use Skill(leyline:risk-classification) instead)
• Strategic architectural decisions after a failure (use Skill(attune:war-room) instead)
• Routine error handling within a single tool call (use Skill(leyline:error-patterns) instead)

Damage Triage

Use this decision tree to route to the correct module:

flowchart TD
    A[Failure detected] --> B{Agent process crashed\nor exited unexpectedly?}
    B -->|Yes| C[modules/crash-recovery.md]
    B -->|No| D{Context limit hit or\nprior decisions unavailable?}
    D -->|Yes| E[modules/context-overflow.md]
    D -->|No| F{git merge / rebase /\ncherry-pick conflicts?}
    F -->|Yes| G[modules/merge-conflict-resolution.md]
    F -->|No| H{State internally inconsistent?\ntask list vs disk vs git index}
    H -->|Yes| I[modules/state-reconciliation.md]
    H -->|No| J[No damage-control needed]

When multiple failure types overlap, start with state-reconciliation.md to establish a known baseline, then address the specific failure class.

Risk Assessment Checklist

Before executing Level 1+ tasks, complete the risk assessment checklist from modules/risk-assessment-checklist.md. Answer these five questions:

1. What could fail in production? — List specific failure scenarios
2. How would we detect it quickly? — Monitoring, alerts, logs
3. What is the fastest safe rollback? — Step-by-step procedure
4. What dependency could invalidate this plan? — External dependencies
5. What assumption is least certain? — Weakest link in the plan

Required for Level 1 (Watch) and above. See modules/risk-assessment-checklist.md for the full template and examples.

Module Reference

• crash-recovery.md: Triage, checkpoint inspection, and safe resume or rollback after an agent crash.
• context-overflow.md: Procedures for reconstructing decision context when the window is exhausted.
• merge-conflict-resolution.md: Classification and resolution strategies for git conflicts, including escalation to human review.
• state-reconciliation.md: Protocol for reconciling divergent state across task list, git index, and on-disk artifacts.
• risk-assessment-checklist.md: Pre-execution checklist for Level 1+ tasks.

Integration Pattern

# In your skill's frontmatter
dependencies: [leyline:damage-control]

Invoke a specific module when a failure class is identified:

# Crash detected
Skill(leyline:damage-control) → modules/crash-recovery.md

# Context limit reached
Skill(leyline:damage-control) → modules/context-overflow.md

For orchestrators managing multiple agents, invoke state-reconciliation at session boundaries regardless of whether a failure occurred. This establishes a verified checkpoint before the next work phase begins.

Exit Criteria

• Agent state is unambiguously known (no unknown partial writes)
• Git index is clean or all conflicts are resolved
• Task list reflects actual completion status of all tasks
• All artifacts expected by downstream agents are present and verified
• If rollback was taken, the rollback is committed and the reverted scope is documented in the task list
• If escalation to human review was required, the escalation record exists before the session closes