unstuck

A Claude Code skill that catches fix-break loops before they burn your tokens.

Install

In Claude Code, run:

/plugin marketplace add josharsh/unstuck

Or manually:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/unstuck
curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/josharsh/unstuck/main/skills/unstuck/SKILL.md \
  -o ~/.claude/skills/unstuck/SKILL.md

Why I Built This

Claude's most expensive failure mode is the one that looks like progress. It edits a file, the test fails, it edits again, fails differently, edits a third time -- each attempt a slight variation of the same broken approach. You burn tokens and time while the actual bug is somewhere it never thought to look.

/unstuck adds a circuit breaker. When it detects a loop, Claude has to stop editing and write a structured diagnosis before touching any more code.

Demo

You: The token refresh still returns 401 after three edits to auth.ts.

Claude: **Loop detected.** I've edited auth.ts 3 times and the test still fails.
Stopping to diagnose.

## Diagnosis

**What I was trying to do:**
Fix the 401 on token refresh in the login flow.

**What I tried:**
1. Wrapped refresh call in try-catch → Still 401
2. Changed Authorization header format → Still 401
3. Added token expiry check before refresh → Still 401

**Why it keeps failing:**
The refresh token itself is expired. Every fix assumes the token is valid
but the test fixture has a hardcoded token from 2024.

**What I should do differently:**
Read the test fixture to check the token value, instead of editing
the production code again.

Want me to try this different approach, or do you want to steer?

Triggers

• Same-file edits -- edited the same file 3+ times for the same task
• Repeated errors -- same error message appears twice
• Reverted changes -- undoes something it just did
• Same approach twice -- about to retry something that already failed
• Escalating changes -- each fix touches more files than the last

If it hits a 4th trigger, it escalates: "I've been going in circles. Here are three options..."

Commands

Command	What it does
/unstuck	Activate loop detection
/unstuck reset	Clear tracking state

Testing

Tested with skillmother:

skillmother test skills/unstuck/

Uninstalling

rm -rf ~/.claude/skills/unstuck