Damage Control

Damage Control

Overview

Provides recovery protocols for agents that encounter broken state mid-session. Damage control covers four failure classes: agent crashes with partial work on disk, context window overflow that causes state loss, merge conflicts blocking forward progress, and general session state corruption requiring reconciliation.

The skill does not prevent failures. It defines what to do after one has already happened, so recovery is consistent, auditable, and does not silently discard work.

When To Use

• An agent process crashed and left files in an unknown state
• A session hit the context limit and cannot load prior decisions
• git merge or git rebase produced conflicts the agent cannot resolve automatically
• Observed state (files on disk, task list, git index) disagrees with expected state
• A downstream agent reports missing artifacts that should have been produced upstream

When NOT to Use

• Proactive risk assessment before work starts (use Skill(leyline:risk-classification) instead)
• Strategic architectural decisions after a failure (use Skill(attune:war-room) instead)
• Routine error handling within a single tool call (use Skill(leyline:error-patterns) instead)

Damage Triage

Use this decision tree to route to the correct module:

flowchart TD