Steel Session Debugging

Skill Boundary

Use this skill to explain what happened in a failed Steel session and what to change next. Start from evidence, not guesses.

Do not use this skill as the primary place for bot-detection mitigation, proxy strategy, CAPTCHA strategy, login reputation, or retry policy. If the evidence points there, collect enough proof and hand off to steel-reliability.

Setup Check

1. Confirm the user provided a Steel session ID or enough context to identify one.
2. Run steel doctor --preflight if CLI auth or API access is uncertain.
3. Prefer Steel CLI diagnostics before raw API calls.
4. Create local artifacts under .steel-debug/; do not paste raw logs into chat unless the user asks.

Investigation Workflow

1. Collect session metadata, browser logs, raw agent logs, semantic agent traces, and viewer/replay links.
2. Redact cookies, bearer tokens, API keys, passwords, form values, and obvious PII before summarizing.
3. Build a timeline: session creation, navigations, actions, waits, console errors, failed requests, CAPTCHA/proxy signals, and final state.
4. Classify the failure using the taxonomy in references/failure-taxonomy.md.
5. Produce an evidence-backed diagnosis with a smallest useful verification step.
6. If the fix involves bot detection, proxy, CAPTCHA, identity, pacing, or login persistence, route to steel-reliability.

Output Format

Diagnosis:
- What happened:
- Most likely cause:
- Evidence:
- What to change:
- Verification step:
- Confidence:

Useful Commands

steel --json sessions get <session-id>
steel --json sessions logs <session-id>
steel --json sessions agent-logs <session-id>
steel --json sessions traces <session-id>
node scripts/collect-session-debug.mjs <session-id>
node scripts/redact-session-debug.mjs .steel-debug/<session-id>/bundle.json
node scripts/summarize-session-debug.mjs .steel-debug/<session-id>/redacted-bundle.json

References

• references/investigation-workflow.md: detailed collection and timeline process.
• references/log-event-types.md: how to separate metadata, browser logs, raw agent logs, and traces.
• references/agent-traces.md: how to read semantic agent trace events.
• references/network-forensics.md: request failures, redirects, and blocked-page evidence.
• references/replay-and-screenshots.md: viewer, player, HLS, and screenshot usage.
• references/failure-taxonomy.md: standard failure classes.
• references/reliability-handoff.md: when to load steel-reliability.