magnus919_agent-skills/pace-plan/references/troubleshooting.md

Troubleshooting

Load this reference when a planned path is degraded, unavailable, unacknowledged, or behaving differently from the approved plan.

Bound The Diagnosis

State the communication pair, operational need, expected current tier, observed symptom, time first observed, and evidence source. Separate an unconfirmed report from a directly observed failure.

Do not provide equipment commands, frequencies, channel changes, credential workarounds, or regulatory advice unless they come from the user's authorized local procedure.

Diagnostic Sequence

1. Confirm the plan state. Which tier should both endpoints be using, and what trigger or decision established that state?
2. Confirm alignment. Are sender and receiver using the same approved procedure, and can each detect or acknowledge the other?
3. Check endpoint readiness. Record only authorized checks of power, equipment readiness, trained staffing, addressing, and local environment.
4. Check path dependencies. Determine whether device, power, provider, network, site, gateway, relay, authentication, staffing, or transport dependencies are degraded.
5. Check fallback independence. Determine whether the proposed next tier shares the observed or suspected failure domain.
6. Apply transition criteria. If the current tier meets its abandonment criterion, present the evidence to the named authority or follow the already authorized procedure.
7. Recover or hand off. Record the selected tier, acknowledgment, unresolved uncertainty, and ownership of restoration work.
8. Preserve the decision. Use templates/troubleshooting-decision-log.md and create a corrective action when the plan or readiness evidence was inadequate.

Stop Conditions

Stop troubleshooting and hand off when:

• an action would exceed the user's authority or applicable procedure;
• immediate danger requires emergency services or incident leadership;
• the next check would be destructive or irreversible;
• further diagnosis is not narrowing the cause and the local procedure calls for escalation or qualified handoff;
• no approved path remains;
• evidence conflicts and the conflict affects safe operation.

Do not label a path restored until both endpoints complete the plan's verification method. A locally successful device check is not end-to-end communication evidence.