Failure Mode Analysis

---
name: failure-mode-analysis
description: "Use when executing, coordinating, planning, or reviewing failure mode analysis agent workflows, cognitive loops, and architecture standards."
version: 6.0.0
last-updated: 2026-09-29
skills:
  - fabel-protocol
tools: Read, Grep, Glob, Bash, Edit, Write
scripts-binding:
  - .agent/scripts/lint_runner.js
  - .agent/scripts/verify_all.js
---

# Failure Mode Analysis Skill

## Mandatory Pre-Flight Context Inspection
Before reading, generating, or refactoring code in the `failure-mode-analysis` domain, inspect these 5 critical parameters:
1. **System Boundaries & Dependencies**: Verify that all required dependencies exist in target package manifests and environment paths.
2. **Runtime Context & Platform Invariants**: Confirm target platform constraints (Node.js, Browser, Mobile OS, Edge runtime) before applying APIs.
3. **Execution Guardrails**: Identify potential side-effects, state mutations, and unhandled asynchronous exceptions.
4. **Validation & Type Contracts**: Validate input data schemas and strict type constraints across all module interfaces.
5. **Observability & Proof of Execution**: Ensure execution produces tangible verification signals (terminal output, tests, metrics).


## Activation Boundaries
- **Activate when:** Use when executing, coordinating, planning, or reviewing failure mode analysis agent workflows, cognitive loops, and architecture standards.
- **DO NOT activate when:** The task falls outside the `failure-mode-analysis` domain or is managed by a different dedicated specialist agent.


## 🔁 Multi-Pass Execution Protocol

| Pass | Phase | Core Action | Adaptive Depth |
|:---|:---|:---|:---|
| **Pass 1** | **Understand** | Deconstruct the user's explicit objective, implicit requirements, and platform constraints. | Fast / Standard / Deep |
| **Pass 2** | **Plan** | Decompose task into smallest logical steps; map dependencies, affected files, and tool calls. | Standard / Deep |
| **Pass 3** | **Execute** | Implement solution with production-grade craft, zero placeholders, and strict typing. | All Modes |
| **Pass 4** | **Verify** | Run linters, unit tests, or compiler checks to validate structural correctness. | All Modes |
| **Pass 5** | **Attack & Falsify** | Perform adversarial search for edge-case failures, counterexamples, race conditions, and traps. | Standard / Deep |
| **Pass 6** | **Harden** | Eliminate discovered friction, optimize performance, and harden error boundaries. | Standard / Deep |
| **Pass 7** | **Quality Gate** | Enforce Verification-Before-Completion (VBC) with concrete terminal proof before finalizing. | All Modes |


Use this skill when evaluating an architecture or an implementation for reliability.

## 🔴 Hallucination Traps

- ❌ **Inventing Metrics** → ✅ Do not guess the impact. Use `UNKNOWN` if capacity bounds are not provided.
- ❌ **Assuming Perfect Recovery** → ✅ Assume retries will fail, connections will drop, and cache will be cold.
- ❌ **Ignoring Blast Radius** → ✅ A single failing API call can take down an entire Node.js event loop. Verify asynchronous boundaries.

## 🚪 Socratic Gate (Pre-Flight)

Before producing a failure mode analysis, you MUST ask the user:

1. What is the expected Recovery Time Objective (RTO)?
2. What are the expected peak requests per second (RPS)?
   If the user says "I don't know", proceed with defensive MVP defaults (e.g. 100 RPS).

## 💥 Failure Injection & Analysis Steps

For each core component (DB, Redis, External API):

1. **Failure Injection**: Assume the component goes down completely.
2. **Detection**: How long until the system knows it's failing? (Are there timeouts configured?)
3. **Propagation**: Does this block other services? (e.g., Thread pool exhaustion, retry storms).
4. **Blast Radius**: Which users or subsystems are affected?
5. **Recovery**: How does the system recover when the component returns? (e.g., Cache stampede).

## 🛡️ Verification-Before-Completion (VBC)

Output a strict **Risk Matrix** for each component:

```yaml
component: '[Name]'
failure: '[Scenario]'
detection_time: '[e.g. 30s timeout]'
blast_radius: '[Scope of failure]'
mitigation: '[e.g. Circuit Breaker, Fallback]'
```

## 🚨 Edge-Case & Failure Mode Matrix

| Scenario | Risk | Production Mitigation |
|:---|:---|:---|
| **Empty or Null Inputs** | Unhandled exception or unexpected rendering collapse | Enforce fallback guards, optional chaining, and explicit empty state handlers |
| **Network Timeout / Latency** | Hanging operations or duplicate side-effects | Implement bounded abort controllers, exponential backoff, and idempotency keys |
| **Concurrency / Race Conditions** | Stale state overwrite or inconsistent data mutations | Use atomic transactions, mutex locking, or cancel-on-resubmit controls |
| **Invalid Schema / Malformed Payload** | Downstream runtime errors or security injection | Validate boundary payloads with Zod/Pydantic schemas prior to execution |
| **Resource / Memory Saturation** | OOM errors, frame drops, or memory leaks | Clean up listeners, cancel active timers, and enforce pagination/virtualization |


## 🤖 LLM-Specific Traps Table

| Anti-Pattern | What AI Commonly Does Wrong | What Is Actually Correct |
|:---|:---|:---|
| **Hallucinated Tool Capabilities** | Assuming an external library or CLI command exists without verification | Run a verification check or verify package.json before referencing tools |
| **Premature Completion Claim** | Declaring a task finished because code was generated without verification | Execute tests, linters, or terminal commands to provide concrete proof |
| **Context Bloat Dumping** | Pasting entire multi-thousand-line files into prompt context | Extract targeted excerpts, symbols, and signatures to preserve tokens |


## 🏛️ Tribunal Verification & Guardrails

**Active Reviewers:** `orchestrator` · `agent-organizer` · `logic-reviewer`
**Slash Command:** `/review` or `/tribunal-full`

### 🔬 Evidence Standard (Tri-State Verification)
Every finding, audit statement, or completion claim must classify its factual certainty:
- **`[OBSERVED]`**: Directly confirmed in the codebase or verified via executed terminal command.
- **`[INFERRED]`**: Logically deduced from code patterns, architectural data flow, or schema relations.
- **`[UNVERIFIED]`**: Speculative hypothesis or runtime possibility requiring active testing or measurement.

### ✅ Pre-Flight Self-Audit Checklist
```
✅ Did I deconstruct the root objective before proposing architecture?
✅ Did I identify dependencies, bottlenecks, and parallelizable sub-tasks?
✅ Did I avoid over-engineering and select the simplest effective pattern?
✅ Did I verify assumptions with concrete file reads instead of speculation?
✅ Did I establish measurable verification criteria before completion?
```

### 🛑 Verification-Before-Completion (VBC) Protocol
**CRITICAL:** You must follow a strict "evidence-based closeout" state machine.
- ❌ **Forbidden:** Declaring a task complete because the output "looks correct."
- ✅ **Required:** You are explicitly forbidden from finalizing any task without providing **concrete evidence** (terminal output, passing test suites, compiler success, or equivalent operational proof) that your output works as intended.