detect-zero-iteration-failure

Detect Zero-Iteration Failure

This skill provides a workflow for identifying and classifying agent failures that occur prior to any task execution.

Identification Criteria

Flag a task execution as a Zero-Iteration Failure if all of the following conditions are met:

1. Iteration Count: The agent reports 0 completed iterations.
2. Tool Usage: No tools were invoked during the session.
3. Artifacts: No documents, files, or code artifacts were created.
4. Conversation Log: The log ends abruptly or contains only an initial error message without agent reasoning steps.

Diagnosis Strategy

When a Zero-Iteration Failure is detected, do not attempt standard agent-level debugging (e.g., analyzing reasoning chains or tool parameters). Instead, investigate system-level causes:

1. Environment Health: Check if the runtime environment initialized correctly (e.g., dependencies installed, API keys loaded).
2. Prompt Parsing: Verify if the initial user instruction was malformed or triggered safety filters immediately.
3. Initialization Crash: Look for stack traces or panic logs occurring before the first agent step.
4. Resource Limits: Check if memory or quota limits were hit before execution began.

Action Plan

1. Tag the Failure: Label the incident as failure_mode: pre_execution rather than failure_mode: agent_logic.
2. Escalate: Route to infrastructure or platform engineering rather than prompt engineering.
3. Retry Strategy: If automating retries, reset the environment context before retrying, as the previous context may be poisoned.

Example Indicators

Status: Failed
Iterations: 0
Tools Called: []
Error: "Session initialization failed: Missing environment variable"