Create Runbook

Capture procedural knowledge as a runbook in runbooks/, following the authoring standard in runbooks/AGENTS.md. Read that file first — it defines the retrieval mechanics, frontmatter contract, split/merge rules, fact-ownership model, contract style, and validation. This skill is the procedure for producing one runbook.

When to use

• After a multi-step investigation whose pattern others could reuse.
• To add a new stage to the investigation pipeline.
• To turn an ad-hoc recipe (a query pattern, an optimization) into a durable how-to.

Steps

1. Check it should be a new file. Search the existing registry

(panda search runbooks "…" with a few phrasings). Content that would always be retrieved together with an existing runbook belongs IN that runbook — the split axis is co-retrieval, not topic count. Only mutually-exclusive-in-use content gets its own file.

1. Extract the pattern, not the incident. Generalize: what is the reusable

diagnostic shape? Drop run-specific ids, timestamps, and host names.

1. Engineer the retrieval surface first. Write the description (what + when,

third person, ≤1024 chars) and 3-6 triggers as the literal queries a caller would type, packed with exact identifiers (table names, error strings, API names). Body sections are embedded too (per-section child vectors), so mid-document facts are findable — but the metadata surface dominates ranking, so it decides whether the runbook wins the queries it should.

1. Make it self-contained for its task. Restate load-bearing facts briefly with a

pointer to their canonical owner (runbooks://<owner>); reserve links for adjacent tasks. A required fact that lives only behind a link is a bug.

1. Write to the standard's structure: owns-line, Inputs (liberal), Output,

Procedure; tables for decision matrices, numbered lists for procedures, positive directives, decisive rule up front. If the output feeds another stage: one filled example, ≤10 top-level fields, summary/reasoning before verdicts, confidence as low|medium|high per runbooks://evidence_discipline.

Verify

• go test ./runbooks/... — frontmatter, refs, uniqueness.
• panda search runbooks "<one of your triggers>" returns the new runbook.
• scripts/runbook-retrieval-check.sh still passes (add a golden query for the

new runbook while you're there).

• The server logs Runbook registry loaded with the new count.

$ARGUMENTS