Diagnose Why Work Stopped

A repeatable procedure for the recurring class of issues where the user (or a manager) points at a stalled / looping / over-recovered issue tree and asks "why did this stop / why is this looping / how do we make sure this doesn't happen again?"

This skill is diagnostic + product-design, not engineering. The output is a written root cause and an approved plan. No code changes leave this skill.

Canonical execution model: read doc/execution-semantics.md before diagnosing or proposing a new liveness/recovery rule. Use that document as the source of truth for status, action-path, post-run disposition, bounded continuation, productivity review, pause-hold, watchdog, and explicit recovery semantics. If the investigation finds a true product-rule gap, the plan should say whether doc/execution-semantics.md needs a matching update.

When to use

Trigger on an assignment whose title or body matches any of:

• "why did this work stop", "why did this stall", "why did this just stop"
• "infinite loop", "looping", "spinning", "going too deep", "recovery went too deep"
• "liveness — what happened here", "this tree stopped working", "stuck"
• "approach it from a product perspective", "general product principle / rule"
• An attached link to a specific stalled / looping / over-recovered issue tree

Also use when the user asks for forensics, root cause, or a write-up before any product change.