# Chaos Engineering

> Deliberately inject failures to discover weaknesses and improve system resilience in a controlled way. Use when validating resilience mechanisms or building confidence in production reliability.

- Skill: `itsual/chaos-engineering` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add itsual/chaos-engineering`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/itsual/chaos-engineering/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Coding & Dev Tools
- Author: itsual (https://skillmd.com/u/itsual)
- Updated: 2026-09-21
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/itsual/chaos-engineering

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# Chaos Engineering

## Overview

Chaos engineering is the disciplined practice of experimenting on a system to build confidence in its ability to withstand turbulent conditions.

## When to Use

- After basic monitoring and resilience patterns are in place
- Before or after major architectural changes
- To validate timeouts, retries, fallbacks, and redundancy

## Process

1. Define steady-state behavior (what “healthy” looks like)
2. Hypothesize how the system will respond to a failure
3. Inject a realistic failure in a controlled way
4. Observe and compare to the hypothesis
5. Improve the system and the controls based on findings

## Principles

- Start small and in non-production or limited blast-radius environments
- Automate experiments where possible
- Always have abort conditions and clear ownership
- Focus on learning, not on causing outages

## Verification

- Resilience mechanisms behave as expected under failure
- Gaps discovered are turned into concrete improvements
- Experiments are repeatable and safe