detect-zero-iteration-failure

# Detect Zero-Iteration Failure This skill provides a workflow for identifying and classifying agent failures that occur prior to any task execution. ## Identification Criteria Flag a task execution as a **Zero-Iteration Failure** if all of the following conditions are met: 1. **Iteration Count:** The agent reports 0 completed iterations. 2. **Tool Usage:** No tools were invoked during the session. 3. **Artifacts:** No documents, files, or code artifacts were created. 4. **Conversation Log:** The log ends abruptly or contains only an initial error message without agent reasoning steps. ## Diagnosis Strategy When a Zero-Iteration Failure is detected, do **not** attempt standard agent-level debugging (e.g., analyzing reasoning chains or tool parameters). Instead, investigate system-level causes: 1. **Environment Health:** Check if the runtime environment initialized correctly (e.g., dependencies installed, API keys loaded). 2. **Prompt Parsing:** Verify if the initial user instruction was malformed or triggered safety filters immediately. 3. **Initialization Crash:** Look for stack traces or panic logs occurring before the first agent step. 4. **Resource Limits:** Check if memory or quota limits were hit before execution began. ## Action Plan 1. **Tag the Failure:** Label the incident as `failure_mode: pre_execution` rather than `failure_mode: agent_logic`. 2. **Escalate:** Route to infrastructure or platform engineering rather than prompt engineering. 3. **Retry Strategy:** If automating retries, reset the environment context before retrying, as the previous context may be poisoned. ## Example Indicators ```text Status: Failed Iterations: 0 Tools Called: [] Error: "Session initialization failed: Missing environment variable" ```