Steel Reliability

Skill Boundary

steel-session-debugging

Setup Check

1. Confirm

   steel doctor --preflight

   passes.
2. Confirm whether the user has a failed session ID, screenshot, logs, or error text.
3. Check feature access before enabling paid CAPTCHA or Steel-managed proxy features.
4. Preserve evidence before changing configuration.

Mitigation Ladder

1. Determine whether the failure is normal auth/app behavior or likely anti-bot/reliability.
2. Preserve evidence: status codes, redirects, challenge text, screenshots, console errors, failed requests.
3. Use profiles when login state, cookies, or reputation matter.
4. Add realistic pacing and lower concurrency.
5. Add Steel-managed proxies only when feature access supports them, or BYOP when the user supplies a proxy.
6. Add CAPTCHA solving when feature access supports it and the target flow allows it.
7. Tune stealth config only with clear justification.
8. Verify by rerunning the smallest failing step.

Feature Check

curl -sSfL "https://api.steel.dev/v1/details" \
  -H "steel-api-key: $STEEL_API_KEY" | jq -r '.plan'

useProxy

References

• references/mitigation-ladder.md

  : staged diagnostic and mitigation workflow.

• references/stealth-and-antibot.md

  : challenge signals and acceptable framing.

• references/feature-access.md

  : plan checks and feature gates.

• references/proxies.md

  : Steel-managed proxies, geotargeting, and BYOP.

• references/captchas.md

  : detection, status, manual solve, and failure handling.

• references/profiles-and-identity.md

  : persistent identity and session context.

• references/credentials.md

  : secure login injection patterns.

• references/pacing-and-behavior.md

  : rate, wait, retry, and concurrency guidance.

• references/failure-signals.md

  : what evidence suggests each reliability class.

• references/session-debugging-handoff.md

  : when to collect more evidence first.