do-not-retry-without-diagnosis

do-not-retry-without-diagnosis is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from aiming-lab/MetaClaw. It costs 38 tokens per session (159 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A short rule against retrying a failed command or API call without first diagnosing it.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps decide when to fix the cause and when a temporary problem, such as a timeout or rate limit, justifies a delayed retry.
Why use it?
It prevents endless retries when the failure comes from permanent causes such as bad input, missing resources, or denied permissions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It helps decide when to fix the cause and when a temporary problem, such as a timeout or rate limit, justifies a delayed retry.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aiming-lab/metaclaw/do-not-retry-without-diagnosis
About the project

MetaClaw is an AI-agent system that learns from conversations and evolves its behavior over time. It provides memory and learning modes for users who want an agent that adapts across interactions, with support for multiple claw-based agent projects.

aiming-lab/MetaClaw · 3,496 stars · on GitHub · arxiv.org

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add aiming-lab/MetaClaw --skill do-not-retry-without-diagnosis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aiming-lab/MetaClaw

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for do-not-retry-without-diagnosis

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aiming-lab/metaclaw/do-not-retry-without-diagnosis/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aiming-lab/metaclaw/do-not-retry-without-diagnosis)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aiming-lab/metaclaw/do-not-retry-without-diagnosis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aiming-lab/metaclaw/do-not-retry-without-diagnosis/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for do-not-retry-without-diagnosis

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aiming-lab/metaclaw/do-not-retry-without-diagnosis"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aiming-lab/metaclaw/do-not-retry-without-diagnosis.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 159 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00038 $0.00159
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.00079
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00032
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00016

Measured 11d ago against content hash d2c1a25e8a05, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

do-not-retry-without-diagnosis scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

memory_data/skills/do-not-retry-without-diagnosis/SKILL.md · 18 lines

What it actually says

Do Not Retry Without Diagnosis

Mistake pattern: Tool call fails → retry the same call → fails again → repeat.

Fix: After the first failure, read the error message carefully and diagnose the root cause before retrying.

Questions to ask:

  • Is this a transient error (network timeout, rate limit)? Retry with backoff.
  • Is this a permanent error (wrong input, missing resource, permission denied)? Fix the cause.

Anti-pattern: Blindly retrying or escalating without examining the error output.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 18 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A d2c1a25e8a05

Subscribe to this mod's changes

do-not-retry-without-diagnosis is a skill published in the GitHub repository aiming-lab/MetaClaw (3,496 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 159 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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