analyze-trajectory

Analyze Trajectory

You are doing a deep dive into a recurring failure pattern. The harness's pre-computed YOUR TRAJECTORY block surfaces that something is recurring; this skill helps you understand why and produce a focused diagnosis.

This skill exists because raw GitHub Actions logs are too large and noisy to digest in your main context window. The pattern (Recursive Language Model — see Reithan's reference in issue #226) is: keep your root context small, dispatch a sub-agent to read the raw logs, and have the sub-agent return a 1-3 sentence summary. Recurse if the summary surfaces a deeper question.

When to use

Trigger this skill when ANY of these hold:

• YOUR TRAJECTORY flagged a STUCK task (≥3 attempts in window, 0 successes)
• A CI error fingerprint appeared ≥2× in the recurring-errors section
• Multiple revert commits appeared across recent sessions (the trajectory's "Reverts in window" line shows the count)
• A specific issue (e.g. #205) has been mentioned in multiple session journals without resolution

When NOT to use

• The trajectory looks healthy. Don't spelunk for problems that aren't there — that's just burning sub-agent budget.
• The failure is well-understood already (you already know the cause from journal/learnings). Skip straight to the fix.
• You're inside Phase B (implementation) and the failure is the task you're currently doing — fix it directly, don't recurse.

Procedure

1. Frame the question (single sentence)

Examples of well-framed questions:

• "Why does the evaluator phase fail with 'AnthropicError: rate_limit_exceeded' on sessions day-53, day-55, and day-56?"
• "Why was the task 'Add /fallback flag' reverted on 6 separate sessions? What's the recurring blocker?"
• "What does run 4321 look like at the moment of failure?"

A good question names a specific event (run id, session day, error fingerprint) and what you want to know about it. Don't ask vague questions like "what's wrong with my trajectory?"