observability

observability is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from open-gsd/gsd-pi. It costs 76 tokens per session (1,859 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to adding useful logs, health checks, and saved failure details to software that runs on its own. It focuses on recording important decisions and errors so a future developer or coding agent can understand what happened.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding logging or metrics, building automated loops or scheduled work, running a server, or fixing a subsystem that is hard to debug. It helps identify failure points and choose the few signals worth recording.
Why use it?
It reduces the guesswork when background jobs, retries, servers, or other long-running code fails without anyone watching. It helps preserve the reason for a failure instead of hiding it.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

About the project

GSD Pi is a command-line coding agent and project workflow system that plans, implements, verifies, and tracks software work through milestones, tasks, Git worktrees, and stored project notes. It is for developers who want structured, longer-running agent sessions using different model providers. The catalogue entries extend GSD Pi with skills and agents.

open-gsd/gsd-pi · 1,198 stars · on GitHub

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/open-gsd/gsd-pi/observability
Any agent
npx skills add open-gsd/gsd-pi --skill observability
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/open-gsd/gsd-pi

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 observability

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/open-gsd/gsd-pi/observability.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/open-gsd/gsd-pi/observability)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/open-gsd/gsd-pi/observability"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/open-gsd/gsd-pi/observability.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 76 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,859 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00076 $0.01859
Opus 5 $0.00038 $0.00929
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00372
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00186

Measured 5d ago against content hash a2be68994d43, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

observability 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 5d 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.

src/resources/skills/observability/SKILL.md · 175 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 175 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

This skill is the thinking process for adding it. Not "add logs everywhere" — add the right signals at the right decision points.

Invocation points:

  • Building auto-mode-style code (loops, dispatch, guards, retries)
  • Adding a background job, watcher, or scheduled task
  • Writing a server or long-running process
  • Refactoring a subsystem that has been hard to debug
  • Addressing a production bug where "we had no visibility" surfaced

<core_principle> LOG DECISIONS, NOT ACTIVITY. "Entering function X" is noise. "Dispatched unit slice/S02 after guard check passed because status=pending" is signal. Every log line should answer a question a future debugger will ask.

FAIL LOUDLY AND PERSIST THE REASON. Silent try/catch that returns undefined is an anti-pattern. If something fails, the failure state needs to be somewhere a fresh agent can find it — a JSONL, a status file, a health endpoint.

OBSERVABILITY IS NOT FREE. Every log allocation, every metric, every health check costs CPU and disk. Add only what you would actually read. </core_principle>

Step 1: Map the failure modes

Before instrumenting, list what can go wrong:

  1. What inputs could be invalid? External API responses, user-submitted data, filesystem state, env vars.
  2. What external dependencies could fail? Network, DB, child processes, filesystem permissions.
  3. What internal invariants could break? State transitions, lock acquisition, concurrency assumptions.
  4. What silent corruption is possible? Truncated writes, partial transactions, stale caches.

This map tells you where to instrument. Don't instrument uniformly — instrument at the decision points where these failures would manifest.

Read the full file on GitHub · 175 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. 5d ago First seen · 175 lines · 76 tokens per session scan A a2be68994d43

Subscribe to this mod's changes

observability is a skill published in the GitHub repository open-gsd/gsd-pi (1,198 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 76 tokens to every session and 1,859 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.