Self-healing skills

Build-along · ~10 min at your own keyboard

Combine skills with the self-annealing rule and they maintain themselves: when a run fails, the skill diagnoses, patches its own SKILL.md, and logs the change. You review the diff instead of doing the surgery.

The long version: Self-healing skills ↗

Do this

0/4

Checkpoints

▸You should now see the self-heal rule inside your skill.
▸You should now see a failure trigger a patch and a changelog line.
▸You should now see the breaking input pass on the re-run.

The three ways this goes wrong

The skill fails but does not patch itself. — Make the rule explicit and put it near the top of SKILL.md.
The self-patch fills in a reason it can't know (e.g. 'empty means no work'). — Reject it. Missing data should be labeled as missing (NO_DATA) and flagged for a person, never turned into a fact.
The changelog does not appear. — Create CHANGELOG.md in the skill folder first and name it in the rule.

Share what happened

Paste the changelog line it wrote and the diff line it added to its own skill.

Strip API keys, passwords, and tokens before you paste. Swap them for [KEY].

🔒 Don't paste confidential, personal-health, or payment info.