Failure Modes & Observability in Design

Failure Modes & Observability in Design is a skill for Claude Code from s977043/river-review. It costs 27 tokens per session (1,097 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design review guide for documenting how critical software flows fail, how errors are returned, and how system health is observed. Observability means the logs, metrics, and traces needed to understand what happened.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when reviewing designs for authentication, payments, data storage, or APIs and checking their failure behavior and operational signals.
Why use it?
It exposes missing timeout, retry, error-response, and monitoring decisions before they cause production incidents.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the river-review plugin — 138 skills, 18 commands, 5 agents, 3 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it when reviewing designs for authentication, payments, data storage, or APIs and checking their failure behavior and operational signals.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/s977043/river-review/failure-modes-observability
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.

Any agent
npx skills add s977043/river-review --skill failure-modes-observability
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/s977043/river-review

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install river-review, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 138 skills, 18 commands, 5 agents, 3 hooks.

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 Failure Modes & Observability in Design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/s977043/river-review/failure-modes-observability/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/s977043/river-review/failure-modes-observability)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/s977043/river-review/failure-modes-observability"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/s977043/river-review/failure-modes-observability/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for Failure Modes & Observability in Design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/s977043/river-review/failure-modes-observability"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/s977043/river-review/failure-modes-observability.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 27 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,097 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00027 $0.01097
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00549
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00219
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00110

Measured 6d ago against content hash 98d0b00d7e4c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Failure Modes & Observability in Design 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.

skills/upstream/failure-modes-observability/SKILL.md · 81 lines

What it actually says

Pattern declaration

Primary pattern: Reviewer Secondary patterns: Inversion Why: 設計の差分から失敗モード・エラー契約・観測性の抜けをレビューし、障害シナリオを逆照射してクリティカルフローの堅牢性を検証する。

Rule / ルール

  • クリティカルフロー(認証、課金、データ保存など)の失敗モード(タイムアウト、リトライ、フォールバック、外部障害、権限不備)を明示する。
  • エラー応答(ステータス、エラーコード、message/detail)の契約を一貫させ、クライアントが判断できる形にする。
  • SLO/監視、ログ、メトリクス、トレースなどの観測性を設計に含める。

Heuristics / 判定の手がかり

  • 外部依存(DB/HTTP/Queue)の失敗時に「何が起きるか」が仕様に無い(例: リトライ方針、タイムアウト、冪等性)。
  • 4xx/5xx の使い分け、エラー構造がエンドポイントごとに不揃い。
  • Rate limit / backoff / circuit breaker の前提があるのに、設計/ADR で触れられていない。
  • 障害時の切り分けに必要なログ(相関ID、requestId、重要な属性)やメトリクスの設計が無い。

Questions / 確認質問(不明な場合は質問として出す)

  • 代表的な失敗モード(タイムアウト、外部 5xx、バリデーション、権限、競合)はどれですか?
  • 冪等性キーやリトライ可否の判断はどこで担保しますか?
  • 監視対象(SLO、エラーバジェット、アラート条件)はありますか?

Actions / 改善案

  • タイムアウト値、リトライ回数、バックオフ、フォールバックを ADR/設計に追記する。
  • エラー応答の共通スキーマ(code/message/detail/requestId など)を定義し、例を載せる。
  • クリティカルフローに相関IDを付与し、ログ/トレースのキーを設計に含める。

Non-goals / 扱わないこと

  • 実際の監視基盤やアラート運用の構築。
  • 既存プロダクション障害の原因究明。
  • 実装詳細(ログライブラリ選定など)の決定。

Pre-execution Gate / 実行前ゲート

このスキルは以下の条件がすべて満たされない限りNO_REVIEWを返す。

  • 差分にAPI定義・ルート定義・設計ドキュメントのいずれかが含まれている
  • inputContextにdiffが含まれている

ゲート不成立時の出力: NO_REVIEW: failure-modes-observability — 失敗モード/観測性に関連する設計差分がない

False-positive guards / 抑制条件

  • 失敗モード/観測性が別 ADR で既に合意され、差分が参照更新のみ。
  • 影響範囲がローカルな試験コードで、運用対象外と明記されている。

評価指標(Evaluation)

  • 合格基準: 指摘が差分に紐づき、根拠と次アクションが説明されている。
  • 不合格基準: 差分と無関係な指摘、根拠のない断定、抑制条件の無視。

人間に返す条件(Human Handoff)

  • 仕様や意図が不明確で解釈が分かれる場合は質問として返す。
  • 影響範囲が広い設計判断やトレードオフは人間レビューへ返す。
Files

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.

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. 6d ago First seen · 81 lines · 27 tokens per session scan A 98d0b00d7e4c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Failure Modes & Observability in Design is a skill published in the GitHub repository s977043/river-review (3 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 27 tokens to every session and 1,097 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

review-all

Multi-agent code review for diffs (project-agnostic). Covers standards, bugs, security, DRY, smells, perf, tests, API contracts, a11y/i18n. Verifies each finding to eliminate false positives. Use for /review-all, pre-PR/pre-commit review, or auditing uncommitted/staged changes.

ncoevoet/claude-review-all · 74 tokens

logic-health

Sweep a directory, module, or full codebase for logic correctness and produce a scored health dashboard with systemic patterns. Trigger when the user requests a health view — "audit the whole codebase", "health check", "health overview", "logic health overview", "audit src/", "audit auth and payments modules", "where…

hyhmrright/logic-lens · 180 tokens

api-analyzer

Validates whether an API request is correct based on provided inputs (method, URL, headers, body, auth, query params).

ranbot-ai/awesome-skills · 30 tokens

daily-workflow

Day-to-day patterns for Symfony development — bin/console debug:router / debug:container / debug:autowiring, bin/console doctrine:schema:validate, make:entity / make:controller / make:state-provider scaffolds, profiler in dev (web debug toolbar), log inspection (var/log/.log), session hook output as health check.…

gerard-labs/superpowers-api-platform · 115 tokens

perf

Analyze Elixir/Phoenix performance — N+1 queries, assign bloat, ecto optimization, genserver bottlenecks. Use when slowness, timeouts, or high memory reported.

oliver-kriska/claude-elixir-phoenix · 43 tokens

ia-php-laravel

Modern PHP 8.4 and Laravel patterns: architecture, Eloquent, migrations, queues, testing. Use when working with Laravel, Eloquent, Blade, artisan, or building/testing a framework-based PHP app. Not for php-src internals, standalone PHP libraries, or general PHP language discussion.

iliaal/whetstone · 67 tokens