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Say what to do when catchup itself fails - #12

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wilbeibi merged 1 commit into
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skill-report-catchup-failures
Sep 4, 2026
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Say what to do when catchup itself fails#12
wilbeibi merged 1 commit into
mainfrom
skill-report-catchup-failures

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@wilbeibi

@wilbeibi wilbeibi commented Sep 4, 2026

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An agent that hits a catchup error has no rule for what to do with it. It retries blindly, or it reports a bug that is really a local problem — a typo in the agent name, a directory with no sessions, an agent that is not installed.

The skill now carries the rule. Follow the recovery the error already names; catchup's messages are written to contain one. Treat as local and never a bug: a usage mistake, no matching session, an unreadable path, a missing agent binary, and a non-zero exit from fork, which is the launched agent's own status passing through rather than a catchup failure. Everything left — a crash, a wrong answer, a failure that repeats — is worth a report, searched for duplicates first, carrying the command, the error, the expectation, catchup --version, and OS/arch, and carrying no transcript text, session IDs, credentials, or home paths. The issue is opened only when the user asks; otherwise the draft is shown.

No CLI or runtime change: SKILL.md only, one bullet and one trigger phrase in the description.

Depends on #13, which makes the "a non-zero exit from fork is the agent's, not catchup's" line true — before it, every such exit was reported as catchup: exit status N and flattened to 1.

@wilbeibi
wilbeibi force-pushed the skill-report-catchup-failures branch from c9bf475 to bbfb9a9 Compare September 4, 2026 04:21
@wilbeibi wilbeibi changed the title Teach the catchup skill to report unexpected failures Say what to do when catchup itself fails Sep 4, 2026
An agent that hits a catchup error has no rule for it, so it either
retries blindly or reports a bug that is really a local problem — a
typo, a directory with no sessions, an agent that is not installed.

The skill now says to follow the recovery the error already names, lists
what is local and never a bug (including a non-zero exit from fork, which
is the launched agent's own status), and describes the report worth
filing when nothing explains the failure: searched for duplicates,
carrying no transcript text, session IDs, credentials, or home paths,
and opened only when the user asks.
@wilbeibi
wilbeibi force-pushed the skill-report-catchup-failures branch from bbfb9a9 to a58c45e Compare September 4, 2026 04:21
@wilbeibi
wilbeibi merged commit 2520118 into main Sep 4, 2026
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@wilbeibi
wilbeibi deleted the skill-report-catchup-failures branch September 4, 2026 04:23
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