self-healing

name	self-healing
description	Use when an authoritative signal reports a regression (failing test, live HTTP/size/PHP-error, canon drift) — diagnose the ROOT CAUSE, fix the source, and confirm the heal by INDEPENDENTLY re-deriving fresh evidence, not by trusting the fix's self-report.
origin	SkyyRose

Self-Healing

A heal that trusts its own self-report is not a heal — it is a claim. The failure mode is symmetric with fail-open gates: a doctor patches the symptom, marks healed: true, and the next authoritative check (a fresh test run, a cache-busted curl) shows the regression never left. This skill governs the loop from detection to a heal that has been proven, not asserted — by a party other than the one who made the fix.

Boot first: read .wolf/buglog.json — the fix may already be known — then SOT.md for canonical product/imagery/brand facts and CLAUDE.md's verification matrix (pick the authoritative method by the kind of regression; never verify a live page with a grep or a test failure with a screenshot). Do not heal from memory.

When to Use

• A failing test or broken build (pytest, phpcs, npm run build).
• A live-page regression on skyyrose.co — HTTP status, response size, PHP-error markers (theme-heal's S1 class).
• Canon drift — brand tokens, catalog/dossier facts, or collection copy diverged from SOT (S2), or a stale asset version serving a cached/superseded build (S3).
• Any broken gate that itself needs healing (pair with [[fail-closed-audit]] first — don't heal a gate by loosening it).

Composable surfaces already in this repo: the theme-heal-doctor / theme-heal-verifier agent pair for live skyyrose.co regressions, autonomous-issue-diagnose-fix for the harder-issue tier, and the devskyy_self_healing MCP tool for programmatic dispatch. This skill is the doctrine those surfaces implement — read it before dispatching any of them.

Method

1. Detect from an authoritative signal — a real test run, a cache-busted curl, a phpcs/php -l pass, a fresh screenshot. Never start from a stale report or a self-graded "looks fixed."
2. Diagnose the ROOT CAUSE, not the symptom. This is the theme-heal-doctor discipline: reproduce the fault against both live and source before touching anything. A patch that makes the symptom disappear without explaining why it appeared is not a diagnosis.
3. Fix the SOURCE. Edit the originating file (not a downstream cache, not the .min build, not the test that observes it). For WordPress theme regressions: edit source PHP, then rebuild .min — never hand-edit the built artifact.
4. Independently re-verify — see below. The fix is not done until someone other than the fixer (a fresh agent, a fresh command) re-derives the evidence.
5. Loop or escalate — see the bounded loop below. Escalation is not failure: a genuinely uncertain root cause is exactly what autonomous-issue-diagnose-fix exists for — it runs parallel independent fix hypotheses through adversarial verification instead of one agent's self-graded pass.

Loop until healed

Bounded, like [[drive-to-green]] — never more than 5 turns, stop if the same failure repeats twice in a row (that's guessing, not healing):

1. Fix the source.  2. Re-run the EXACT authoritative check that first reported the
   regression (same test, same cache-busted URL, same phpcs target — not a paraphrase).
3. Independently re-derive evidence (see below) — do not accept the fixer's self-report.
4. Still broken → repeat from 1.  5. Same error twice in a row → STOP, escalate to
   autonomous-issue-diagnose-fix (parallel independent hypotheses + adversarial grading)
   rather than guessing a third time.

Verify from an authoritative source

The heal is confirmed ONLY by INDEPENDENT re-derivation of FRESH evidence — never the healer's self-graded report. This is the theme-heal-verifier pattern: it re-runs a fresh curl (cache-busted), a fresh grep against source, a fresh phpcs/php -l, and a fresh screenshot itself — it does not read the doctor's "healed: true" and nod along.

• Re-run, don't re-read. A second pass over the doctor's own transcript is not verification; a fresh command invocation is.
• Default to skeptical — the verifier's starting assumption is STILL BROKEN. The doctor must produce evidence that survives independent re-derivation, not merely restate its fix.
• Match the check to the claim — per CLAUDE.md's verification matrix: live-page claim → cache-busted curl + Playwright eyes-on (mobile + desktop); test claim → pytest -v output from this session; canon-drift claim → catalog CSV / dossier / SOT.md diff, not memory.
• Cite file:line for the fixed branch and the fresh command's literal output — not a paraphrase of what should happen.

Adversarial pass

• The verifier IS the adversary — [[adversarial-verification]] is not an optional extra step here, it is the re-verify step. Try to REFUTE "it's healed"; a heal that survives one honest attempt to break it again is real, one that doesn't survive is not.
• Pair with [[fail-closed-audit]] before declaring a gate healed: a "fix" that makes the gate pass by loosening its check (widening a threshold, catching-and-ignoring an exception, deleting the assertion) is a fail-open regression wearing a heal's clothes — reject it the same way you'd reject any other fail-open defect.

Guardrails · Handoff · Log

• Fix the code, never the test. Fix the ROOT CAUSE, never the symptom — a patch that only suppresses the symptom will resurface, and resurfacing is what trips the ×2 escalation.
• Neither the doctor nor the verifier deploys, commits, bumps versions, or edits permissions — those steps happen only after independent verification passes, per the STOP-AND-SHOW gate in CLAUDE.md.
• Route backend↔theme fixes per CROSS-PLUGIN.md: skyyrose-core owns backend/security root causes, skyyrose-design owns imagery/theme root causes — hand off, then re-verify here after the handoff returns.
• Log every heal to .wolf/buglog.json (root_cause, fix, occurrences — bump, never duplicate), run scripts/wolf_recurring_sync.py when occurrences >= 2, and record the lesson via [[continuous-learning]].