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 skills add randommonicle/claude-skills --skill honest-failure-surfacinggit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/randommonicle/claude-skillsWrote 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/randommonicle/claude-skills/honest-failure-surfacing)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/honest-failure-surfacing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/honest-failure-surfacing/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/honest-failure-surfacing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/randommonicle/claude-skills/honest-failure-surfacing.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" 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 | $0.00083 | $0.00608 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00042 | $0.00304 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00017 | $0.00122 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00061 |
Grade A, and why
honest-failure-surfacing 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 12d 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 — 48 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Honest failure surfacing
Three field incidents where the surface lied about what failed, plus a storage failure that stayed invisible for hours behind a swallowing loop and a cosmetic progress bar. Layer: norm + playbook — the one-line norm in the global CLAUDE.md is the everyday trigger; this file is the depth.
The rule
Every distinct failure mode gets its own user-facing message; never collapse them into one reassuring string. A surface that cannot say what failed sends the user (and the developer) to fix the wrong thing.
How to apply
- Classify before wording. A catch block once painted every transcription failure as "No connection" while the real cause was a malformed-JWT 401 — costing hours of a field inspection. Distinguish at minimum: auth, offline, server, and input failures.
- A disabled control cannot explain itself. A
disabledbutton swallows the tap, and the handler holding the explanation never runs. If a control can legitimately fail a precondition, let it be pressed and have it say why. - Per-item failures in a loop surface to the user, not just to a log. A sync loop that swallowed per-photo upload errors showed a fake "Uploading…" pulse forever; nothing was uploading. Progress UI reflects real progress or it is a lie.
- A permanently-failed item is surfaced as given up, not silently retried forever — and never allowed to wedge the rest of the queue.
- Error level is for terminal states. Self-healing retries logged at
errordrowned the one terminal give-up that mattered. Retries log at warning; the give-up logs at error.
What this skill does not do
It does not decide what happens to the data on a failing path — no-silent-data-drop owns content preservation. It does not define skip semantics in tests — prove-it-can-fail owns check integrity.
Why
A wrong error message is worse than none: it actively redirects diagnosis. Every incident in the evidence cost hours specifically because the surface asserted a cause it had not established. Evidence: ASH LESSONS_LEARNED 2026-05-28, 2026-06-18, 2026-07-14 (offline), and the CLAUDE.md storage-RLS upsert lesson; ICC L-007 (shared evidence with guard-the-spend-paths).
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.
- 12d ago First seen · 48 lines · 83 tokens per session scan A 021a9f00160b
honest-failure-surfacing is a skill published in the GitHub repository randommonicle/claude-skills (23 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 83 tokens to every session and 608 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 2026-08-31.
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