circleci-public CircleCI Builds
Overview
Use this skill to turn failing CircleCI pipelines into actionable fixes with clear evidence. Prioritize fast root-cause isolation, minimal safe patches, and explicit validation criteria.
Read references/transient-vs-deterministic.md when deciding whether a failure should be fixed in code/config, retried, mitigated with rerun behavior, or reported as external/transient.
Read ../config/references/test-results.md when the failure involves missing test metadata, flaky test reruns, test splitting, or JUnit XML setup.
Inputs To Gather
- Failing pipeline/workflow/job identifier
- Branch and commit SHA
- First failing step and key log lines
- Whether rerun on same commit reproduces failure
Workflow
- Identify the primary failing signal.
- Record the first failing job and step, not every downstream failure.
- Classify issue type.
- Config syntax/reference issue
- Environment/toolchain mismatch
- Dependency/cache issue
- Test or build regression
- External/transient failure
- Apply the smallest viable fix.
- Patch only files tied to confirmed root cause.
- Keep workaround scope narrow.
- Validate.
- Run highest-signal local checks when possible.
- Define expected CircleCI success signals for the rerun.
- Report residual risk.
- Call out unverified assumptions and likely follow-up checks.
Guardrails
- Do not hide deterministic failures with blanket retries.
- Avoid mixing unrelated refactors into incident fixes.
- Treat external service outages as report-and-mitigate unless user asks for deeper redesign.
- Keep confidence levels explicit when logs are incomplete.
- Do not recommend automatic reruns or flaky-test workflows until the failure is classified as plausibly transient.
Output Contract
Provide:
- Failure summary (pipeline/workflow/job/step).
- Root-cause hypothesis with confidence.
- Applied changes with file list.
- Validation plan and expected pass signal.
- Remaining risk.