dsh-fail-guard
English | 中文
Stops the agent when it keeps failing on the same tool: after N consecutive failures it pushes a four-part stop instruction (what it tried / the full error text / the first guess at why / what you need to do) so it reports instead of trying a fourth way to spell the same command.
Why it has to come from outside
Repeated short lines in reasoning ("Do it. Do it.") are usually not model degradation — they are the residue of consecutive failure: the same thing fails, the parameters change, it fails again, nothing new comes in, so the same "time to act" decision gets re-made over and over.
Prompt-level rules ("stop after two consecutive failures") do not work in that state — the model is not reading the prompt then, it is reading its own thinking. The interruption has to come from outside.
Measured on a 74-turn session: turns 1–67 kept the share of short single-line fragments between 7% and 48%; the moment a task hit a dozen consecutive failed steps it jumped to 81.6%, then 85.9% / 89.1% / 91.4%.
Install
dsh plugin --profile desktop add dsh-fail-guard
Restart once. cordis.patch.yml is applied through the dsh.bundle manifest — no need to edit your profile config.
Configuration
Edit it in Plugins → dsh-fail-guard → details. Fields are marked .volatile(): saving takes effect immediately, no restart.
| Key | Default | Meaning |
|---|
threshold | 2 | Consecutive failures before stopping |
sameToolOnly | true | Count per tool; turn off to share one counter across all tools |
stopText | built in | The instruction pushed into the conversation |
stopSummary | built in | The one-line summary shown in the panel |
debug | false | Write events, counts and trips to a log file |
logFile | <plugin dir>/fail-guard.log | Where debug writes |
Or set it directly in cordis.patch.yml:
- id: dsh-fail-guard
config:
threshold: 3
What counts as a failure
A tool/result counts if either holds: message.isError === true, or meta.opsShell.exitCode exists and is non-zero. Both are needed — a shell command exiting 1 is not marked isError, and some tool-level errors carry no exit code. Counters are per session and per tool, and any success resets them.
Limits
- It does not abort the call that just failed — that already happened
- It does not judge whether a failure is "real"; any non-zero exit counts
- It does not reset the conversation; the stop instruction is just one more user message
- It is not a rate limiter: after a trip, further failures start counting again and will trip again at the threshold
License
MIT
