Dogfooding TraceDecay

SkillAI & models

Use when installing a TraceDecay checkout for live local development, refreshing the globally available binary without a release, or validating agents and the daemon against unmerged TraceDecay changes.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

Connect ahel once, and every AI you use reads what you have installed.

Then ask your AI: use the Dogfooding TraceDecay skill

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by scriptedalchemy/tracedecay in .claude/skills/dogfooding-tracedecay/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

Use the repository command. Do not run release upgrade or point agents at target/; Cargo may replace or lock that binary during later builds.

Install the checkout

  1. Confirm the checkout/branch contains the exact changes to dogfood and that unrelated worktrees are not being built accidentally.

  2. From that checkout's root, run:

    cargo dogfood
    
  3. Treat any nonzero exit as incomplete deployment. Inspect the printed stage, post-update, daemon, or doctor failure before retrying.

The command builds the release binary, copies it outside the repository to ~/.local/lib/tracedecay/dogfood/tracedecay, atomically replaces ~/.local/bin/tracedecay, refreshes tracked integrations through the normal post-update lifecycle, restarts the managed daemon, and runs health checks. Cargo's isolated target/test-profile/.tracedecay profile is removed before the live refresh.

Verify live use

Run these only after cargo dogfood succeeds:

command -v tracedecay
tracedecay --version
tracedecay daemon status
tracedecay doctor

Then reproduce the changed host scenario with the ordinary global tracedecay command. Inspect relevant service/host logs. Restart a host only when its integration is in-process or its plugin module cannot hot-reload.

Guardrails

  • Do not run tracedecay upgrade for checkout dogfood; it installs a published release.
  • Do not kill host-owned MCP shim processes indiscriminately.
  • Do not delete the source worktree until its commits are pushed and merged.
  • Re-run cargo dogfood after any source change that must reach live agents.

Signals

GitHub stars
73
Forks
5
Last commit
Sep 2026
Advanced
Catalog kind
skill
Gateway key
dogfooding-tracedecay
Source
github.com/scriptedalchemy/tracedecay