Damage Control Skill for Claude

Table of Contents

• Overview
• When To Use
• When NOT To Use
• Damage Triage
• Module Reference
• Integration Pattern
• Exit Criteria

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
    A[Failure detected] --> B{Agent process crashed\nor exited unexpectedly?}
    B -->|Yes| C[modules/crash-recovery.md]
    B -->|No| D{Context limit hit or\nprior decisions unavailable?}
    D -->|Yes| E[modules/context-overflow.md]
    D -->|No| F{git merge / rebase /\ncherry-pick conflicts?}
    F -->|Yes| G[modules/merge-conflict-resolution.md]
    F -->|No| H{State internally inconsistent?\ntask list vs disk vs git index}
    H -->|Yes| I[modules/state-reconciliation.md]
    H -->|No| J[No damage-control needed]

When multiple failure types overlap, start with

state-reconciliation.md to establish a known baseline, then

address the specific failure class.

Risk Assessment Checklist

Before executing Level 1+ tasks, complete the risk assessment

checklist from modules/risk-assessment-checklist.md. Answer

these five questions:

• What could fail in production? List specific failure

scenarios.

• How would we detect it quickly? Monitoring, alerts,

logs.

• What is the fastest safe rollback? Step-by-step

procedure.

• What dependency could invalidate this plan? External

dependencies.

• What assumption is least certain? Weakest link in

the plan.

Required for Level 1 (Watch) and above. See

modules/risk-assessment-checklist.md for the full template and

examples.

Module Reference

• crash-recovery.md: Triage, checkpoint inspection, and

safe resume or rollback after an agent crash.

• context-overflow.md: Procedures for reconstructing

decision context when the window is exhausted.

• merge-conflict-resolution.md: Classification and

resolution strategies for git conflicts, including

escalation to human review.

• state-reconciliation.md: Protocol for reconciling

divergent state across task list, git index, and on-disk

artifacts.

• risk-assessment-checklist.md: Pre-execution checklist for

Level 1+ tasks.

Integration Pattern

# In your skill's frontmatter
dependencies: [leyline:damage-control]

Invoke a specific module when a failure class is identified:

# Crash detected
Skill(leyline:damage-control) → modules/crash-recovery.md

# Context limit reached
Skill(leyline:damage-control) → modules/context-overflow.md

For orchestrators managing multiple agents, invoke

state-reconciliation at session boundaries regardless of whether

a failure occurred. This establishes a verified checkpoint before

the next work phase begins.

Exit Criteria

• Agent state is unambiguously known (no unknown partial writes)
• Git index is clean or all conflicts are resolved
• Task list reflects actual completion status of all tasks
• All artifacts expected by downstream agents are present and

verified

• If rollback was taken, the rollback is committed and the

reverted scope is documented in the task list

• If escalation to human review was required, the escalation

record exists before the session closes