Failure Signal Audit
This is an OMH failure-signal-audit workflow skill, projected for Agent Skills hosts (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, opencode, OpenClaw, pi).
Why This Exists
failure-signal-audit exists so Hermes users can ask for this workflow in chat and receive a structured, evidence-bounded OMH operating surface instead of ad hoc narration.
Do Not Use When
- The request is already handled by a narrower explicit skill with stronger evidence.
- The user asks OMH to secretly run external platforms, connectors, schedulers, file exports, or runtime agents.
- The only safe answer is to ask for missing authority, credentials, target, or observed evidence first.
Examples
Good example:
- Prompt: failure-signal-audit check this frontend and agent trace for swallowed errors, false green status, and dangerous fallbacks.
- Expected behavior: Produce
prepare_failure_signal_auditwith required context, wrapper actions, and not-evidence boundaries. - Why: The prompt names a real workflow surface that Hermes can orchestrate without hiding execution.
Bad example:
- Prompt: failure-signal-audit silently patch every catch block and claim the system is reliable now.
- Expected behavior: Report the missing observed evidence or authority instead of claiming the external step happened.
- Why: Prepared OMH guidance is not platform, runtime, connector, file, memory, or delivery evidence.
Completion Checklist
- Audit scope, source surfaces, and evidence types are named.
- Swallowed errors, dangerous fallbacks, propagation gaps, and false-green claims are reported as separate finding types.
- Each finding names location or evidence ref, severity, user/operator impact, and a smallest safe remediation route.
- No remediation, runtime repair, verification, CI, merge, or future reliability claim is made without observed follow-up evidence.
Recovery Notes
- If no code/trace/runtime evidence is supplied, prepare the audit plan and request the smallest source surface to inspect.
- If the user wants live service SLO or incident review, route to reliability-review.
- If the user wants rendered browser proof, route frontend visual evidence to visual-qa before PASS.
Use When
Use when Hermes should audit code, frontend/browser behavior, agent traces, or runtime reports for failures that were swallowed, downgraded, hidden by fallbacks, or reported as green without enough evidence.
Strong routing signals: `failure-signal-audit`, `failure signal audit`, `silent failure`, `silent failures`, `silent failure hunter`, `swallowed error`, `swallowed errors`, `empty catch`, `ignored exception`, `hidden failure`, `hidden failures`, `dangerous fallback`, `bad fallback`, `fallback hides errors`, `missing error propagation`, `error propagation`, `console errors ignored`, `network failures ignored`, `false green`, `false pass`, `무음 실패`, `조용한 실패`, `숨은 실패`, `삼킨 에러`, `에러 삼킴`, `위험한 fallback`, `위험한 폴백`, `폴백이 에러 숨김`, `실패 신호 감사`, `실패 신호`
Catalog Metadata
Category: review
Phase: failure-signal-audit
Quality tier: workflow-surface-gated
Reasoning demand: standard
Quality bar:
- Name the user-facing workflow objective, required context, next action, and stop condition.
- Separate prepared guidance from observed platform, runtime, connector, file, memory, or delivery evidence.
- Expose missing tools, credentials, targets, or observations as user-visible gaps.
- Hold masked-failure and intended-fallback as competing hypotheses for each suspect site, each with observed evidence for and against, until one reading is discriminated.
- Order evidence probes cheapest-discriminating-first: read the handler and its callers, then logs and traces, before demanding expensive reruns or instrumentation.
- When a check went green without an observed fix, bisect from the last run that surfaced the failure to the first that swallowed it before naming the masking change.
- Attribute a masked failure to a specific handler or fallback only with revert-verify evidence (the signal observed reappearing without it), or mark causation unproven.
- Route remediation only against a reproduced failing signal; a remediation handoff without a reproduced failure first is a guess.
Required inputs:
- user request
- target context
- delivery or status expectation
- known missing evidence
Expected outputs:
- failure_signal_audit_plan/v1
- silent_failure_finding/v1 when observed
- fallback_risk_matrix/v1
- propagation_gap_map/v1
- false_green_status_review/v1
- remediation_handoff/v1 when needed
Artifact expectations:
- failure_signal_audit_plan/v1 with source boundary, surfaces, evidence types, and stop condition
- silent_failure_finding/v1 only from observed code, trace, console, network, test, or runtime evidence
- fallback_risk_matrix/v1 separating safe fallback, user-visible degraded mode, masked failure, and destructive fallback
- propagation_gap_map/v1 for missing context, lost stack, ignored async rejection, empty catch, null/empty default, or log-only handling
- false_green_status_review/v1 comparing PASS/green claims against observed checks and missing signals
- remediation_handoff/v1 only after findings are accepted and the selected owner is explicit
Artifact contracts:
This label denotes the machine-enforcement level, not a skill quality score and not an observed evidence state.
- contract_id:
failure_signal_audit_plan/v1; enforcement_level:guidance_only; consumer_id:none
Safety rules:
- A failure signal audit is not remediation, code modification, runtime repair, console/network pass, incident closure, verification, review, CI, merge-readiness, merge, or proof that hidden failures no longer exist.
- Do not claim connector, gateway, runtime, file generation, memory mutation, or host automation evidence from prepared guidance.
Runtime Evidence
Use the current host's own tools and subagent/task mechanism when available;
otherwise run the same lanes sequentially or name the unavailable capability.
A prepared plan, handoff, checklist, or skill installation is not execution,
review, CI, merge-readiness, or merge evidence. Report actual tool results or
not_observed / not_available; never invent dispatch or host accounting.
Treat supplied context as advisory, not proof of hidden memory reads or writes.
State scope, constraints, verification, and the stop condition before work.
Supporting paths are relative to this skill directory; sibling skill paths are
relative to its parent. Resolve them from the host-provided skill base directory
({baseDir} on hosts that provide it), never a hardcoded install location.
A named workflow not installed here is unavailable, not permission to emulate
its host-specific capabilities. Verify through the real surface before done.
