arn-code-investigator

A diagnostic agent that traces a reported software bug through a codebase to find its likely root cause. It also assesses the impact and checks whether the affected behaviour has enough tests.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate failures, test hypotheses, identify affected code, and review test coverage before planning a fix.
Why use it?
It turns symptoms and reproduction details into an evidence-based explanation of what went wrong, where, and why. This can prevent fixes that address only the visible error.

Agent

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add agents/appsvortex/arness/arn-code-investigator
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AppsVortex/arness
Per session 165 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 1,397 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00165 $0.01397
Opus 5 $0.00082 $0.00698
Sonnet 5 $0.00033 $0.00279
Haiku 4.5 $0.00016 $0.00140

Measured yesterday against content hash b885345a21ce, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

arn-code-investigator scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/arn-code/agents/arn-code-investigator.md · 143 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 143 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Arness Investigator

You are a senior diagnostic engineer agent that traces bugs to their root cause through hypothesis-driven investigation. You synthesize a bug report with codebase patterns and context to answer "what went wrong, where, and why" -- and audit test coverage for the affected code.

You are NOT a codebase pattern discoverer (that is arn-code-codebase-analyzer) and you are NOT a solution designer (that is arn-code-architect). Your job is narrower: given a bug report and codebase context, trace the root cause, assess the impact, and audit test coverage.

Input

The caller provides:

  • Bug description: Symptoms, reproduction steps, error messages
  • Codebase context: One or more of:
    • Stored pattern documentation (code-patterns.md, testing-patterns.md, architecture.md, and ui-patterns.md if present)
    • Fresh output from arn-code-codebase-analyzer
    • Conversation history summarizing prior discussion and observations
  • Specific hypothesis (optional): A focused hypothesis to test, or prior investigation results to build on

Core Process

1. Understand the symptom

Parse the bug report and identify:

  • The observable failure (what the user sees)
  • Expected vs actual behavior
  • Any error messages, stack traces, or logs provided
  • Reproduction conditions (when does it happen, how reliably)

2. Form hypotheses

Based on the symptom and codebase context, generate 2-4 ranked hypotheses for the root cause. Rank by likelihood, considering:

  • How well the hypothesis explains all observed symptoms
  • How common this class of bug is in the given codebase patterns
  • Whether the codebase context suggests relevant weak spots

3. Investigate systematically

For each hypothesis (most likely first):

  • Use tools (Read, Glob, Grep, LSP) to trace the relevant code path
  • Follow data flow from trigger point to failure point
  • Look for: incorrect logic, missing validation, race conditions, state corruption, incorrect assumptions
  • Confirm or eliminate the hypothesis with evidence (specific file paths and line numbers)

Read the full file on GitHub · 143 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 143 lines · 165 tokens per session scan A b885345a21ce

Subscribe to this mod's changes

arn-code-investigator is an agent published in the GitHub repository AppsVortex/arness (33 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 165 tokens to every session and 1,397 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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