failure-forensics

failure-forensics is a skill for Claude Code from cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents. It costs 65 tokens per session (659 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for investigating failures by treating unusual cases, logs, timestamps and degraded behaviour as useful evidence.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for incident post-mortems, flaky behaviour, overload, simultaneous failures, unexplained anomalies, unstable feedback and reconstructing what happened from traces.
Why use it?
It reduces the risk of explaining an incident too quickly, averaging away anomalies or assuming that failure will only mean a complete crash.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the zetetic-team-subagents plugin — 16 skills, 2 commands, 23 agents, 7 hooks, 1 MCP server shipped together

Good fit Use it for incident post-mortems, flaky behaviour, overload, simultaneous failures, unexplained anomalies, unstable feedback and reconstructing what happened from traces.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/failure-forensics
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 cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents --skill failure-forensics
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install zetetic-team-subagents, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 16 skills, 2 commands, 23 agents, 7 hooks, 1 MCP server.

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 failure-forensics

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/failure-forensics/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/failure-forensics)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/failure-forensics"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/failure-forensics/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 failure-forensics

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/failure-forensics"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents/failure-forensics.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 65 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 659 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.
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 $0.00065 $0.00659
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00329
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00132
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00066

Measured 9d ago against content hash f96702f59fb2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

failure-forensics 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 9d 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.

skills/failure-forensics/SKILL.md · 49 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 49 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Failure Forensics

Problem shape: something failed (or will fail) and the evidence is being averaged away, cleaned up, or explained by its most convenient story. The move: treat anomalies as data, reconstruct the timeline at the right timescale, and design the degraded state as a first-class behavior.

Relevant geniuses

Agent Use when
hamilton overload and simultaneous failure scenarios; priority shedding by criticality; the degraded mode is undesigned; "users will never do that"
mcclintock aggregate metrics look smooth but one specific case is weird; a class of observations is being trimmed as noise
fleming anomalies keep appearing during routine work and being cleaned up; "that's weird" said and never investigated
ginzburg reconstruct what happened from marginal traces and involuntary evidence (logs, timestamps, artifacts nobody meant to leave)
braudel the incident needs three-timescale decomposition — event, cycle, structure — before a root cause is named
wu the failure hides under an assumption everyone considered too obvious to test
maxwell the system oscillates, overshoots, or hunts — feedback stability and gain-margin diagnosis

Invocation

  1. Pick the best-fit agent above. If two or more fit, run tools/genius-invoker.sh route "<problem>" and take the top ranked match.
  2. Load it: tools/genius-invoker.sh invoke <agent> "<problem>", then read agents/genius/<agent>.md in full.
  3. Apply the agent's <workflow> step by step and answer in its <output-format>. Reproduce before claiming a cause; classify the cause before proposing the fix (coding-standards §6 root-cause protocol).
  4. Typical chain: ginzburg reconstructs the timeline → braudel separates timescales → hamilton designs the degraded state. Run via tools/genius-invoker.sh compose ginzburg hamilton -- "<problem>".
  5. If no shape above matches, use a standard team agent instead.

Read the full file on GitHub · 49 lines

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. 9d ago First seen · 49 lines · 65 tokens per session scan A f96702f59fb2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

failure-forensics is a skill published in the GitHub repository cdeust/zetetic-team-subagents (7 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 65 tokens to every session and 659 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-31.

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