/chaos

name: chaos
description: "Injects controlled faults for resilience testing on non-prod. Triggers: chaos, fault injection, latency injection, dependency kill, resilience test."
effort: medium
disable-model-invocation: true
argument-hint: "[target]"
context: fork
agent: chaos-monkey
allowed-tools: Bash, Read

Chaos Command

$ARGUMENTS

Triggers a controlled resilience experiment.

Usage

/chaos <experiment> [target]
# Example: /chaos latency backend-api
# Example: /chaos kill redis

Protocol

1. **Safety Check**: Verify env != PROD. 2. **Baseline**: Check system health is green. 3. **Inject**: Run the fault injection. 4. **Observe**: Monitor logs/metrics for 60s. 5. **Recover**: Restore system health. 6. **Report**: Did we survive?

Rules

• **MUST** verify target environment is non-production before injecting
• **NEVER** run against a system without a healthy baseline
• **CRITICAL**: abort immediately if recovery does not complete within the observation window
• **MANDATORY**: log every injected fault with timestamp and scope

Gotchas

• `NODE_ENV=production` on a developer's machine is common — checking that env var alone is not enough proof of non-prod. Combine with kubeconfig context, cloud account ID, or a project-specific env file check before injecting.
• `docker stats` reports cached values; the first sample immediately after injection is often pre-fault. Wait at least 5 seconds before reading metrics.
• Kubernetes liveness probes may self-heal the faulted pod inside the 60s observation window — the report shows green while the workload is still flapping. Check pod restart counters, not just health endpoints.
• Latency injected with `tc` (Linux traffic control) persists across container restarts on the host and across SIGTERM. Always pair the inject step with an explicit `tc qdisc del dev <iface> root` cleanup in the recover step — the `fork` context will not undo it for you.

When NOT to Use

• In production without an explicit, written runbook — use `/workflow incident-response` for real incidents
• When the system has no observability (no metrics, no logs) — fix observability first
• For load testing — use dedicated load-test tooling, not chaos injection
• During an active incident — stabilize first with `/panic`, then investigate