agent-introspection-debugging

name	agent-introspection-debugging
description	Use when an agent is looping, retrying without progress, drifting from its goal, or failing repeatedly — structured capture, diagnosis, contained recovery, and introspection reports.

Agent Introspection Debugging

Use this skill when an agent run is failing repeatedly, consuming tokens without progress, looping on the same tools, or drifting away from the intended task.

This is a workflow skill, not a hidden runtime. It teaches the agent to debug itself systematically before escalating to a human.

When to Activate

• Maximum tool call / loop-limit failures
• Repeated retries with no forward progress
• Context growth or prompt drift that starts degrading output quality
• File-system or environment state mismatch between expectation and reality
• Tool failures that are likely recoverable with diagnosis and a smaller corrective action

Scope Boundaries

Activate this skill for:

• capturing failure state before retrying blindly
• diagnosing common agent-specific failure patterns
• applying contained recovery actions
• producing a structured human-readable debug report

Do not use this skill as the primary source for:

• feature verification after code changes; run the project's test suite (see the tdd-guide agent)
• framework-specific debugging when a narrower skill already exists in this repo
• runtime promises the current harness cannot enforce automatically
• production incidents — that's incident-response; this skill is for agent-loop failures

Four-Phase Loop

Phase 1: Failure Capture

Before trying to recover, record the failure precisely.

Capture:

• error type, message, and stack trace when available
• last meaningful tool call sequence
• what the agent was trying to do
• current context pressure: repeated prompts, oversized pasted logs, duplicated plans, or runaway notes
• current environment assumptions: cwd, branch, relevant service state, expected files

Minimum capture template:

## Failure Capture
- Session / task:
- Goal in progress:
- Error:
- Last successful step:
- Last failed tool / command:
- Repeated pattern seen:
- Environment assumptions to verify:

Phase 2: Root-Cause Diagnosis

Match the failure to a known pattern before changing anything.

Pattern	Likely Cause	Check
Maximum tool calls / repeated same command	loop or no-exit observer path	inspect the last N tool calls for repetition
Context overflow / degraded reasoning	unbounded notes, repeated plans, oversized logs	inspect recent context for duplication and low-signal bulk
ECONNREFUSED / timeout	service unavailable or wrong port	verify service health, URL, and port assumptions
429 / quota exhaustion	retry storm or missing backoff	count repeated calls and inspect retry spacing
file missing after write / stale diff	race, wrong cwd, or branch drift	re-check path, cwd, git status, and actual file existence
tests still failing after “fix”	wrong hypothesis	isolate the exact failing test and re-derive the bug

Diagnosis questions:

• is this a logic failure, state failure, environment failure, or policy failure?
• did the agent lose the real objective and start optimizing the wrong subtask?
• is the failure deterministic or transient?
• what is the smallest reversible action that would validate the diagnosis?

Phase 3: Contained Recovery

Recover with the smallest action that changes the diagnosis surface.

Safe recovery actions:

• stop repeated retries and restate the hypothesis
• trim low-signal context and keep only the active goal, blockers, and evidence
• re-check the actual filesystem / branch / process state
• narrow the task to one failing command, one file, or one test
• switch from speculative reasoning to direct observation
• escalate to a human when the failure is high-risk or externally blocked

Do not claim unsupported auto-healing actions like “reset agent state” or “update harness config” unless you are actually doing them through real tools in the current environment.

Contained recovery checklist:

## Recovery Action
- Diagnosis chosen:
- Smallest action taken:
- Why this is safe:
- What evidence would prove the fix worked:

Phase 4: Introspection Report

End with a report that makes the recovery legible to the next agent or human.

## Agent Self-Debug Report
- Session / task:
- Failure:
- Root cause:
- Recovery action:
- Result: success | partial | blocked
- Token / time burn risk:
- Follow-up needed:
- Preventive change to encode later:

Recovery Heuristics

Prefer these interventions in order:

1. Restate the real objective in one sentence.
2. Verify the world state instead of trusting memory.
3. Shrink the failing scope.
4. Run one discriminating check.
5. Only then retry.

Bad pattern:

• retrying the same action three times with slightly different wording

Good pattern:

• capture failure
• classify the pattern
• run one direct check
• change the plan only if the check supports it

Integration

• Run the project's test suite after recovery if code was changed.
• Record failure patterns worth keeping in the project's LEARNINGS.md or memory.
• Escalate to the user when the issue is not technical failure but decision ambiguity.
• Check git status, stashes, and local config drift if the failure came from conflicting local state.

Output Standard

When this skill is active, do not end with “I fixed it” alone.

Always provide:

• the failure pattern
• the root-cause hypothesis
• the recovery action
• the evidence that the situation is now better or still blocked