Show HN: Skill to stop AI agents from retry-looping during GitHub outages
A new Agent Skill checks GitHub’s status API before retrying failed GitHub commands, helping AI coding agents avoid endless retry loops. It determines whether an outage is due to GitHub degradation and advises waiting instead of local debugging. The skill can be installed via npx and is released under the MIT license.
- ▪The skill queries https://www.githubstatus.com/api/v2/summary.json to assess GitHub’s current health before a second retry.
- ▪If GitHub is degraded, the skill stops further retries and reports the affected component or incident.
- ▪If GitHub is operating normally, the skill suggests investigating local causes such as authentication or rate limits.
- ▪It supports failures from git operations, the gh CLI, Actions runs, PR merges, and API errors.
- ▪Installation is done with the command npx skills add tbille/check-github-status and the code is MIT‑licensed.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,931 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | GitHub |
| Canonical URL | https://github.com/tbille/check-github-status |
| Publication time | Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:14:35 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-07T07:20:41.698Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-07T07:20:41.698Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | cfRiNGMk48Br · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
check-github-status 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.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at GitHub.