An Agent Skill that stops AI coding agents from looping on retries when a GitHub-related command fails — by checking githubstatus.com first to see whether the failure is actually GitHub's fault.
Why
GitHub outages (Actions runners down, PRs failing to sync/merge, API 5xx errors)
often look like local bugs. An agent that just keeps retrying a git push, gh
command, or Actions re-run can burn a lot of time chasing a problem that isn't
there. This skill checks GitHub's status API before a second retry, and tells the
agent (and you) whether to keep debugging locally or just wait out an outage.
Install
npx skills add tbille/check-github-status
What it does
On any GitHub-related failure (git push/pull/fetch/clone, gh CLI errors,
Actions failures, PRs that won't merge, GitHub API errors), it runs:
curl -s https://www.githubstatus.com/api/v2/summary.json
and uses the response to decide:
- GitHub is degraded → stop retrying, report the affected component/incident, suggest waiting.
- GitHub is fine → say so, and move on to local causes (auth, rate limits, workflow syntax, etc.).
See SKILL.md for the full instructions.
License
MIT