| name | drift-probe |
| description | Re-verify a site plugin's load-bearing routes and handles, and report CHANGED with what moved — before a user hits it as a wrong answer. |
Drift probe
Site skills decay. The probe is what turns decay into a maintenance task instead of a
confidently wrong answer.
What it checks
For the target plugin's profile, in one sequential pass:
- Routes — each entry in
access.working_routes still returns a real page, by
body classification rather than status code.
- Identity — a known URL still resolves to the known item: canonical, title,
echoed identifier.
- Handles — for each
extraction entry, the durable description still finds the
value, and the value matches the recorded fixture.
- Endpoint canaries — each mapped endpoint still returns its canary field.
- Dead routes — anything recorded as blocked is checked once, no retries. If it
now works, that is news too.
Steps
- Read
profiles/<site-id>.json for the routes, handles and fixtures.
- Run the checks in order, sequentially, at human speed. Stop after the first failure
in a chain — a dead route makes downstream handle checks meaningless noise.
- Report per check:
OK, CHANGED: <what was expected> not found at <where>, or
BLOCKED: <route> refused. Exit non-zero if anything is not OK.
- Name the affected skills — which SKILL.md files depend on each failed check, so
the repair has a scope.
- Write
notes/drift-<YYYY-MM-DD>.md with the results, and update the profile's
verified date only for the checks that passed.
- Hand failures to
repair-broken-skill.
Generating the probe
templates/probe.py is the starting shape: it reads the profile, runs the checks,
prints one line per check, exits non-zero on any failure. Adapt it per site rather
than generalising it — a probe that needs the browser route cannot be a plain script,
and should be a documented sequence the agent runs instead.
Notes
Run the probe before trusting any site plugin that has not been used in weeks, and
after any report that a skill "returned something odd". Odd output is almost always
drift, and drift found by a probe costs minutes.
