state-safety

What problem does it solve?

State files used by the colony can become corrupted or lost during unexpected shutdowns or concurrent updates. This skill teaches safe handling of critical JSON state files to prevent data loss and ensure recoverability.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Atomic writes for state mutations: write to a temporary file first, then rename to the target to prevent partial writes.
• File locking and guarded mutations: acquire a lock before modifying COLONY_STATE.json, pheromones.json, constraints.json, or session.json to avoid race conditions.
• Post-write validation and backups: validate the resulting JSON and restore from backups if validation fails.
• Automatic backup strategy: maintain a single, valid backup per file to enable rollback after failures.
• Read-time corruption checks: verify files exist, are non-empty, and parse correctly; fall back to backups when needed.
• State files and critical fields awareness: track essential files and their required keys to maintain integrity.

Quick Start

Enable atomic writes and locking across state files and perform a backup after every successful write.