knowledge-mcp: Skill for Claude Code

RUN-A-SMOKE-TEST — exercising the running system the way a caller does

Runs after any rebuild or restart of a serving component, after a batch of changes lands, during lulls, and after ANY fix whose claim is about live behavior, regardless of unit-test color. The concrete operations are whatever the system under test serves; the protocol is the shape.

Minimum battery (post-rebuild):

1. Read paths: exercise each primary read surface once against content whose expected result is known in advance.
2. Write round-trip: create a record through the public write path, then read it back BY ITS IDENTIFIER through a separate read path and confirm the specific field written — the write's success response is not the readback.
3. Processing observation: confirm in the serving component's own output (logs, metrics, traces) that the stages you expect actually fired for the operation you just performed. An absent stage where sibling stages are present is a finding; absence where NOTHING was recorded is a broken probe.
4. Record what each step is a proxy FOR. A read returning your record proves the serving state contains it — not that every processing stage ran; retrieval and derivation are different layers.

Deterministic-identifier lifecycle probes: create → verify → delete → verify → recreate → verify, with a caller-supplied stable identifier so every phase is addressable. Each verify goes through BOTH the derived/indexed read path AND the direct by-identifier path — they can disagree, and their disagreement is the signal. The recreate phase is what finds lifecycle defects; skipping it reduces the probe to a happy-path smoke.

Probe eligibility comes first: the probe record's type or category must be eligible for the derived surface being asserted against — an excluded category makes every phase vacuous while producing plausible output. Establish eligibility with a known-positive of the same category BEFORE the probe, and state the check in the result.

Adversarial controls: for any check passing on a zero, an absence, or an equality — inject the failure, observe red, revert, observe green. A check never seen red has unknown discriminating power, including the battery itself.

Baseline-vs-treatment asymmetry is the signal: run the same probe through two paths that SHOULD behave alike and compare. A fresh-create completing in seconds against a recreate that never completes localizes the defect to what differs; one number alone cannot distinguish slow from never. Record both.

Confound elimination before classification, in order, one command each: is the running binary/build the one you think (inspect it for the change under test); does the record exist at all (fetch by identifier); has enough time passed for the mechanism you await (interval derived FROM SOURCE, not memory); are you observing the right instance, environment, or build flavor.

Preserved live fixtures: when a probe reproduces a defect whose fix is queued, LEAVE THE FIXTURE IN PLACE and name it as that fix's acceptance criterion — the only artifact proving the fix works against the state that actually occurred.

AMBER is the third result: verified at the storage level, NOT verified at the serving level. Neither green nor red; its only valid disposition is reporting the observed asymmetry for investigation. Declaring green on storage-level evidence is the failure this result exists to prevent; declaring red without the confound elimination above is the mirror failure.