recon-first-investigation skillA
recon-first-investigation is agent-read markdown (skill) from clickety-clacks/tightbeam: Establish the truth before anyone fixes — reproduce, enumerate competing hypotheses, disconfirm rather than confirm, and find a regression's provenance before proposing a fix. Use when investigating a symptom or root cause..
Indexed from public GitHub and served as immutable, content-addressed versions. Install it pinned to an exact SHA-256 with the mdr CLI, and every file is verified before it reaches your agent: the main file against the SHA-256 recorded here, the others against the git hashes of its source commit. The deterministic audit below grades the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Recon-first investigation Establish the truth before anyone fixes. A fix dispatched on a guess costs a wrong-fix iteration; the recon step is cheaper than that iteration. 1. Take the symptom, not a theory. Investigate what is reported — the observed behavior, the failing surface, the inputs — without inheriting the reporter's hypothesis. The framing you were handed is one hypothesis among several; a compliant investigation that starts from the presumed cause confirms it. Fresh eyes are the value of the recon session. 2. Quit thinking and look, then make it fail. Read the evidence — code, logs, runtime traces, commit history, the spec's intended behavior — and reproduce the symptom under your own control before explaining it. Go to where the phenomenon actually occurs; do not reason over a secondhand description. A symptom you cannot reproduce is itself the first finding. 3. Enumerate competing hypotheses, then disconfirm. List all the plausible explanations up front. Weigh each piece of evidence by whether it DISCRIMINATES between them — evidence "consistent with" your leading theory is usually consistent with the rivals …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add clickety-clacks/tightbeam/recon-first-investigation@git:20260723.7608dd1mdr add clickety-clacks/tightbeam/recon-first-investigation@sha256:1b9a6ec7df38f4d4Pin to a label to follow the author's releases, or to a sha256 for exact bytes. Either way the resolved hash is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install fetches those bytes again and checks them, so it installs them exactly or fails.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_qyypwlduojry3mxp)
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Versions
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (3405 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
clickety-clacks/tightbeam · 14 stars · license none · pushed 2026-09-27 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_qyypwlduojry3mxp GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=clickety-clacks/tightbeam/recon-first-investigation GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/1b9a6ec7df38f4d40665d4915c6381c22aa65e9445f3e7db924e7e794387db61
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