Skip to content

Troubleshooting

Contract parse failures

If Claude returns malformed JSON, agent-scaffold:

  1. Saves the raw response to ~/.cache/agent-scaffold/failures/<timestamp>.json.
  2. Prints a warning and asks Claude to repair the response.
  3. If the repair still fails, saves that raw response too and aborts with file pointers.

You can re-run agent-scaffold new with AGENT_SCAFFOLD_CACHE_DIR set to inspect failures elsewhere.

--write-mode choices

Mode Behavior
abort (default) Refuse to write into a non-empty destination.
skip Keep existing files, write only new ones.
diff Show a unified diff per file and prompt before overwriting.
overwrite Replace everything.

All writes stage to a sibling temp directory and os.replace into place, so a failure mid-generation leaves the destination untouched.

Re-running validation

agent-scaffold validate /path/to/generated --tier static|build|smoke reruns one of the post-generation tiers without re-invoking the LLM.

Environment audit

agent-scaffold doctor is a read-only audit of local tools (python, uv, docker, ruff). --recipe <slug> adds authentication and per-service readiness rows for everything the recipe declares; --explain <topic> opens the matching getting-started doc from the deployments repo. It never mutates anything, so it's safe to run first when something looks wrong.