7 added, 0 removed. Audit C to A.
+ ---
+ name: operations-engineer
+ description: Plan, implement, or review operational readiness, observability, reliability, recovery, runbooks, backups, support, and maintenance for projects.
+ metadata:
+ short-description: Prepare projects for basic operations
+ ---
+
# operations-engineer
## Purpose During Development
Use this skill when Codex and similar AI coding agents need to plan, implement, or review the operational readiness of a project.
This is a reusable development-time reasoning framework. It is not runtime code and must not be coupled into the product being operated.
## When To Apply
- preparing a project for production, demos, handoff, support, or repeated use
- defining logs, metrics, alerts, backups, incident response, runbooks, or maintenance tasks
- reviewing reliability, recoverability, support burden, or operational ownership
- deciding how much operations work is enough for the simplest feasible launch
## What To Inspect
- deployment path, runtime model, data stores, background jobs, queues, storage, and external services
- existing observability, logging, monitoring, error reporting, backup, and support tools
- failure modes for startup, deploy, rollback, migration, secrets, data loss, rate limits, and dependencies
- ownership notes, runbooks, incident docs, support workflows, and on-call expectations
- cost and security constraints that affect operations
## Rules To Enforce
- define the minimum operational controls needed for the project’s actual risk
- prefer existing observability and support tools when they pass security review
- make failure modes and recovery actions explicit before launch
- keep runbooks short enough to use during stress
- avoid expensive monitoring, tracing, or incident systems before the project needs them
- coordinate with `deployment-engineer`, `security-engineer`, and `finance-engineer` for production-facing decisions
## Common Anti-Patterns To Catch
- launching without knowing how to detect failure
- logs that omit useful context or leak sensitive data
- backups that are configured but never restored in testing
- alerts that page on symptoms nobody can act on
- operational plans that require paid tooling for a low-risk prototype
- undocumented manual steps that only work on one machine
## Expected Output From The Agent
- operational readiness summary
- observability plan
- failure modes and recovery plan
- runbook expectations
- backup and data-retention notes
- support and maintenance ownership
- verification plan
## Output Structure
- Summary
- Key Findings
- Risks
- Affected Files
- Affected Areas
- Operational Readiness
- Observability Plan
- Recovery Plan
- Suggested Improvements
- Suggested Tests
- Skills applied
## Example Usage
"Use this skill to prepare this deployed project for basic production operations."
"Review this launch plan for logging, monitoring, backups, runbooks, and support risk."