resilience-audit

Resilience Audit

Language: Generate EVERYTHING at runtime in the user's language — questions, answer options, menu labels, recommendations, report narrative. Detect from their messages; never default to English just because this file is English. English is allowed only for technical terms: commands, paths, code identifiers, severity labels (CRITICAL/HIGH/MEDIUM/LOW), and tier names (Light/Standard/Heavy).

For every operation: "what happens when this FAILS?" Report; do NOT fix unless asked.

Failure categories

1. External I/O — network down/slow, API 4xx/5xx/timeout, rate-limit. Retry w/ backoff? Timeout set? Clear error vs hang?
2. Storage — disk full, permission denied, partial write. Atomic write (temp+rename)? Cleanup on failure? Existing good copy untouched?
3. Partial completion — half-done op (50/100 files). Reported as FAILURE, never success.
4. Crash / OOM — killed mid-op. Idempotent restart? No orphaned half-state?
5. Concurrency — two instances, race, deadlock. Locking / idempotency / safe re-entry?
6. Input / data — malformed, null, truncated, huge. Validate at boundary? Fail-fast?
7. Dependency down — fallback/cache/graceful degrade? Clear error vs silent hang?
8. Resource exhaustion — bounded? Backpressure? Cleanup on error path?

Per-stack timeout/atomicity/idempotency patterns to grep: read references/checks.md before scanning.

For each failure point, check 4 things

• Detected? code notices it (doesn't swallow)?
• Handled? retry/fallback/fail-clean — not ignored, not silent-success?
• Recoverable? rollback/idempotent; no data loss or corruption?
• Communicated? clear error to user+log; not a hang, not a false "done"?

Discipline

• Trace actual failure path (cite file:line). Don't assume handling exists; prove it.
• "partial = failure" — any path reporting success on partial completion = CRITICAL.
• "logged" ≠ "handled" — swallowed+logged error that corrupts state or returns success = CRITICAL.

Fix mode (choice-gated)

After the report, present via ask_question:

• Fix safe ones — add missing timeout, null/input validation, clear error+log on unhandled path. Each: checkpoint → fix → build+tests → revert if newly red.
• Let me pick — user-selected fixes only.
• Report only — change nothing.

NEVER auto-fix: retry/rollback/recovery/atomicity logic (semantic changes can introduce new failure modes).

Output

| operation | failure mode | effect | handling (file:line) | severity | recommended guard | Ordering/atomicity findings · Summary (counts + top fixes) · Not assessed

Severity: CRITICAL (data loss/corruption/silent-success) · HIGH (crash/hang/partial-no-recovery) · MEDIUM (poor degradation/missing retry) · LOW (cosmetic)

Escalation — Scope & Model Quality

Tiers are capability targets, not platform commands — resolve each to your host's nearest lever. No lever for one? Degrade gracefully — never fake parallelism you can't do; escalate via model tier + reasoning depth instead.

Level	Intent	Capability target	Cost
Light	Spot failure-mode check, key paths only	Cheapest model · single agent, no sub-agents.	Low
Standard	Balanced FMEA, multi-category coverage	Balanced model · raised reasoning · sub-agents per category only if your platform runs concurrent workers (else single-agent).	Balanced
Heavy	Full 8-category FMEA + adversarial verify	Most capable model + largest context · deepest reasoning · max sub-agent fan-out if supported · adversarial cross-check where available.	High

Per-platform Heavy levers + Heavy-run durability: read references/escalation.md before a Heavy run. No concurrent fan-out on your host → escalate by model + reasoning only.

Agent Context (interactive): score the tier rubric, then call ask_question once with the 3 tiers — the pick marked ✓, score shown, labels localized — and wait for the choice before starting. ask_question = your platform's question tool: Claude Code AskUserQuestion · Cline ask_question · Copilot askQuestions · Gemini CLI ask_user (business-tier product; individual tiers ended 2026-06-18 → Antigravity CLI) · Codex request_user_input · Cursor/Devin Desktop (ex-Windsurf)/Antigravity built-in prompts; none → numbered text menu.

Tier rubric (deterministic): +1 each — ① >20 files or whole-repo/cross-module reach ② >2 of this skill's categories relevant ③ release/security/pre-ship context ④ findings will drive code changes. 0–1 Light · 2–3 Standard · 4 Heavy. Freshness cap: scope already audited ≥Standard this session → cap at Light (re-auditing fresh ground wastes tokens; scope to what changed). Default tier: honor .coalmine.json defaultTier unless the user requests a tier for that run — an explicit request overrides everything.

Hook Context (auto-triggered): auto-Light, no tier question, no sub-agents — report first. Interactive session (a user is present) → offer the fix menu after the report; non-interactive → report-only. Never fix without a chosen option.

Entanglement: after the report, if confirmed findings fall in another canary's domain, offer it once via ask_question (one line, max one offer): perf/N+1 → scale-canary · contract/serialization/config → drift-canary · failure-path/retry → resilience-audit · logging/metrics → telemetry-canary · coupling/DI → testability-canary · dependency/CVE → supply-chain-audit · unverified version-sensitive claim → source-grounding · missing/stale rule → gold-standard.

Self error-report: if this skill misbehaves (contradictory instruction, broken procedure, wrong finding class), OFFER to file it at https://github.com/HetCreep/CoalMine/issues/new/choose with a user-reviewed summary — never auto-submit, never include unapproved code or paths.