cascading-failures SKILL.md skillA
cascading-failures from robsonkades/agent-skills is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add robsonkades/agent-skills/cascading-failures@git:20261016.c769bd8Pins git:20261016.c769bd8 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- robsonkades/agent-skills
- Path
skills/cascading-failures/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 5
- Latest version
- git:20261016.c769bd8, committed Oct 16, 2026
- First version recorded
- Sep 3, 2026
- Size
- 13,300 bytes
- Repository stars
- 3
- License
- Apache-2.0
How one slow dependency becomes a total outage: the amplification loop and the four points that close it — retry storms, unbounded queues, thread and connection exhaustion, an inner timeout longer than the outer one. Covers why cutting offered work is usually the first stabilization step in a cascade, metastability sustained by backlog, recovery herds and criticality separation. Use when one dependency's latency rise took down services that never call it, when the dependency recovered and the…
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Cascading Failures ## Purpose A cascade is a loop, not a list of failures. A dependency slows; its callers' threads and connections sit blocked waiting; the callers saturate; _their_ callers slow; retries add load to the already-slow dependency; it slows further. A wide incident is a cascade only when such positive feedback expands or sustains the failure. Name and cut that edge. A shared infrastructure outage or a coordinated bad deploy can create a wide blast radius without such a loop, so topology and timing remain competing hypotheses. The failure this prevents is the intervention that deepens the outage. **Feedback reduces useful completions by amplifying waste, resource retention or capacity loss.** Retries and abandoned calls can consume extra resources; repeated crashes or health-based ejections can overload the survivors even when total traffic and attempts per logical call stay unchanged. Common responses—uncontrolled replicas, longer timeouts, more retries—can increase offered load. Stabilization usually starts by reducing admitted work; repairing the trigger or adding warm, usable capacity can also recover the system when it does not amplify the bottleneck. …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add robsonkades/agent-skills/cascading-failures@sha256:3eebfe8a2bebbae9The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20261016.c769bd8, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_vzckry2i66pwt2y5)
2 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 5 versions of this file, between Sep 3, 2026 and Oct 16, 2026, about one every 11 days.
| version | committed | commit | size | audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| git:20261016.c769bd8 latest | 2026-10-16 | c769bd8 | 13,300 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260927.9ecadfd | 2026-09-27 | 9ecadfd | 13,036 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260923.832673e | 2026-09-23 | 832673e | 11,488 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260906.e6ad4bd | 2026-09-06 | e6ad4bd | 10,901 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20260903.f199530 | 2026-09-03 | f199530 | 9,298 B | A | view |
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 (13300 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
robsonkades/agent-skills · 3 stars · license Apache-2.0 · pushed 2026-10-28 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_vzckry2i66pwt2y5 GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=robsonkades/agent-skills/cascading-failures GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/3eebfe8a2bebbae99f42b1d2f7821a445444b76277fa5323a892fc33e39fe556
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.