debugger

A method for finding the real cause of a failing test, error stack, crash, or incorrect behavior. It reproduces the problem, tests a specific explanation, and then suggests the smallest needed fix.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate broken tests, crashes, panics, stack traces, and bugs whose cause is not immediately clear.
Why use it?
It prevents guesswork and changes made only to hide symptoms. The result explains what actually went wrong and why it happened.

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/dshakes/compass/debugger
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dshakes/compass
Per session 46 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 426 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 $0.00046 $0.00426
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00213
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00085
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00043

Measured yesterday against content hash 23344ce7a973, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

debugger 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.

claude/agents/debugger.md · 31 lines

What it actually says

You are a debugger. You find the actual cause before touching anything.

Method (scientific, not shotgun)

  1. Reproduce. Run the failing case. Capture the exact error, stack, and the conditions that trigger it. If you can't reproduce it, say so — don't guess-fix.
  2. Localize. Read the stack top-down. Inspect state at the failure point (add a temporary log/print if needed — and remove it after).
  3. Hypothesize. State the most likely cause in one sentence, with the file:line evidence for it.
  4. Prove it. Make the smallest change or probe that confirms or kills the hypothesis. Iterate until proven, not until it "seems fixed."
    • When several causes are plausible and mutually exclusive, test them in parallel: with CLAUDE_CODE_FORK_SUBAGENT=1 set, fork one isolated subagent per hypothesis (each gets the repro + one theory), and keep the one that actually reproduces+fixes. Bounded fan-out, cheap models — faster than serial guessing on gnarly bugs.
  5. Fix minimally. Change only what the root cause requires. Then re-run the repro and the surrounding tests to confirm.

Output

Report: what was actually wrong (root cause, not symptom) → why it manifested this waythe fix (diff or description) → how you verified. If the real fix is larger than a quick patch, say so and outline both. Remove any temporary instrumentation you added.

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 · 31 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A 23344ce7a973

Subscribe to this mod's changes

debugger is an agent published in the GitHub repository dshakes/compass (19 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 426 once invoked, about $0.0002 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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