Skill Failure-to-Fix Loop
Turn a skill's real-world failure into a regression test, find the root cause, patch the smallest fix, and re-run until all cases pass.
Before & after
Same prompt, same agent — the only difference is the skill.
That sounds frustrating. You could try a few things—go back and review what the skill was supposed to do, check if there are edge cases you missed, maybe simplify the instructions. You might also want to test it with different inputs to see where it fails. It could help to document what's breaking so you can update the skill gradually. Would you like to walk through the failure together and see what's going wrong?
RECURSIVE SKILL FAILURE-FIX LOOP STEP 1: CAPTURE THE FAILURE • Run the skill on a real task (not a test case) • Screenshot or copy the exact error output • Note the input context: what conditions triggered the failure? EXAMPLE FAILURE CAPTURED: Skill: "Pull YouTube analytics into Notion" Error: "API returned 403 Forbidden - channel not verified" Context: First run on a new creator account with YouTube Premium STEP 2: DIAGNOSE ROOT CAUSE Analyze what the skill assumed (e.g., "channel is already verified") that didn't hold. STEP 3: UPDATE SKILL.MD Add a new section to SKILL.md: GATEWAY CHECK: Before pulling analytics, verify the YouTube channel is verified. If unverified, ask the user to complete verification first. Link to YouTube Studio. STEP 4: RE-RUN THE SAME TASK Confirm the updated skill now handles the previously failing case. STEP 5: REPEAT Wait for the next failure (real usage). Feed it back. Update skill.md again. After 5 recursive loops, the skill becomes production-grade. THE PATTERN: Manual walkthrough → Initial skill → Failure 1 → Update → Failure 2 → Update → ... → Failure 5 → Publish Each failure improves the skill's robustness. Never build blindly; learn from each real-world break.
About this skill
When a skill fails on a real task, the usual fix is another vague sentence in SKILL.md. This skill fixes it from evidence: capture the failure verbatim, find the real cause, write a test that fails today, and patch until it passes without breaking anything else.
What it does
- Captures the failing prompt, output, and expected behavior as a regression case with binary assertions
- Classifies the root cause: trigger, wrong sibling, ambiguous instruction, missing knowledge, rigid template, script, environment, or model limit
- Patches the smallest thing and moves deterministic steps like paging and retries into scripts
- Re-runs the new and existing cases in fresh sessions, capped at three rounds
- Commits one fix per failure, never pushes or publishes
What you get
A root-cause diagnosis, a regression case, a patch diff, re-run results, and a commit message.
Best for
Skill authors maintaining skills used in real workflows, where the same failure must not come back.
SKILL.md preview
---
name: recursive-skill-failure-fix-loop
description: Fix a Claude skill that failed on a real task - capture the failure verbatim, find the root cause (trigger, instruction, missing knowledge, script, or environment), turn it into a regression test, patch the smallest thing that fixes it, and re-run the full test set until the new case and every old case pass, with a round cap and one git commit per fix. Use when the user says "my skill broke on this task", "the skill did X instead of Y, fix it", "make sure it never fails like this again", "turn this failure into a test", "skill keeps failing on the API pull", or casually "it messed up again, patch the skill".
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