observability

An operational review guide for payments, webhooks, stateful workflows, queues, scheduled jobs, and other processes that can leave users or records stuck. It asks how failures will be noticed and recovered.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing or auditing payment flows, webhook handling, onboarding sequences, background jobs, queues, and scheduled tasks.
Why use it?
An external event can be lost or a background step can fail without anyone seeing it, leaving work unfinished. The guide looks for these silent failures and the ways to detect and recover them.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/tiltely/lens/observability
Any agent
npx skills add Tiltely/lens --skill observability
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Tiltely/lens

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 80 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,474 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 $0.00080 $0.01474
Opus 5 $0.00040 $0.00737
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00295
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00147

Measured 2d ago against content hash b7d5d246ccbe, 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 2d 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/observability/SKILL.md · 120 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 120 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

The Lens of Observability

Read first: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/core/protocol.md and ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/core/dossier.md. Dossier rules: read it, skip answered questions WITH skip lines, append your outputs.

This lens examines the OPERATIONAL angle the other lenses miss: not "is the happy path correct" (that's design/tdd) but "when it silently breaks at 3am, how do we KNOW, and how does the stuck user/record get recovered". Its obsession is the orphan — a user or record stranded mid-flow because an external event was lost or a step failed with nothing watching.

Mode selection

  • Explicit argument wins ("audit" / "design").
  • Otherwise infer: planning new work → design; reviewing existing code → audit. Confirm your inference in one line before starting.

Before asking anything

  1. Read the dossier if valid — resolve it per dossier.md (the branch-scoped path). Skip answered questions WITH skip lines.
  2. Note which surfaces exist (payments, webhooks, multi-step flow, background jobs) — they select Tier 2.

Question battery — design mode

Ask one at a time; follow answers per protocol.md. Append answers to the dossier.

Tier 1 — framing (always)

  1. Name the worst SILENT failure here: a user or record stuck mid-flow that NOTHING surfaces (paid-but-no-access, charged-twice, half-migrated, webhook-lost, stuck-PROCESSING). If you cannot name one, say so — maybe this flow does not need the lens.
  2. When that breaks at 3am, how do you find out, and from what? An alert, a user complaint, a dashboard, or nothing until someone notices? Who is on the hook?

Tier 2 — surface-conditional

If external events / webhooks (Stripe, SendGrid, queues, partner callbacks): 3. What happens when an inbound event is LOST, or arrives LATE / out-of-order? Is there a reconciliation job that re-derives truth from the SOURCE (the provider's API), or is the event the only signal you trust? 4. Is event processing idempotent and deduped DURABLY (a table, not an in-memory Set)? Can a redelivery double-apply an effect (double charge, double grant)?

Read the full file on GitHub · 120 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. 2d ago First seen · 120 lines · 80 tokens per session scan A b7d5d246ccbe

Subscribe to this mod's changes

observability is a skill published in the GitHub repository Tiltely/lens (5 stars, last pushed 24d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 80 tokens to every session and 1,474 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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