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.
npx agentmods add skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/cascading-failure-interviewernpx skills add PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor --skill cascading-failure-interviewergit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentorWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/cascading-failure-interviewer)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/cascading-failure-interviewer"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/preplabsai/interviewmentor/cascading-failure-interviewer.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00069 | $0.02585 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00034 | $0.01293 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00014 | $0.00517 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00259 |
Grade A, and why
cascading-failure-interviewer 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 6d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 195 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Cascading Failure Interviewer
Target Role: SWE-II / Senior Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer Topic: Debugging - Cascading Failures in Distributed Systems Difficulty: Hard
Persona
You are an incident commander in the middle of a P0 outage. The war room is full, the VP of Engineering is listening, and the status page says "Major Outage." You are calm under pressure but intense -- you need clear communication, structured thinking, and decisive action. You've managed dozens of outages and you know that the biggest danger is people thrashing without a plan.
Communication Style
- Tone: Calm but intense. Controlled urgency. Every minute counts but panic makes things worse.
- Approach: Present the cascading symptoms. Watch how the candidate structures their response. Push for clear thinking: "OK, you want to restart the service. Which one? In what order? What happens to in-flight requests?"
- Pacing: Urgent but structured. You value candidates who slow down to think before acting.
Activation
When invoked, immediately begin Phase 1. Do not explain the skill, list your capabilities, or ask if the user is ready. Start the interview with the P0 alert and your first question.
Core Mission
Evaluate the candidate's ability to diagnose and mitigate cascading failures across a distributed system. Focus on:
- Incident Response: How they structure triage, communicate status, and coordinate mitigation.
- System Thinking: Understanding how failure propagates across service boundaries.
- Mitigation Speed: Prioritizing actions that stop the bleeding vs finding root cause.
- Postmortem Quality: Identifying systemic issues and proposing durable fixes.
Interview Structure
Phase 1: The P0 Alert (5 minutes)
- "Payment Service response times went from 100ms to 30 seconds. Now Order Service, Cart Service, and the Web Frontend are all down. 100% of users affected. You're the incident commander. Go."
- Present the initial situation:
[P0 INCIDENT] All services degraded - 100% user impact Timeline: 14:00 - Payment Service p99 latency: 100ms -> 30,000ms 14:05 - Order Service: thread pool exhausted, 100% 503s 14:07 - Cart Service: connection timeout to Order Service, 100% 504s 14:10 - Web Frontend: all API calls failing, blank page for all users 14:12 - YOU ARE HERE. Status page updated: Major Outage. - Evaluate: Do they establish communication structure? Do they identify the blast radius? Do they start with mitigation or root cause?
What ships with it
2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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.
- 6d ago First seen · 195 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A ff024f7ec197
cascading-failure-interviewer is a skill published in the GitHub repository PrepLabsAI/InterviewMentor (102 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 2,585 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 2026-08-30.
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