What is intermittent-issue-debugging?

A systematic method for investigating bugs that appear only sometimes. It uses detailed logs, monitoring, and investigation of timing, race conditions, and resource limits.

Use it for occasional errors, flaky tests, suspected race conditions, timing-dependent bugs, and failures caused by exhausted resources.

Sporadic failures are difficult to reproduce, so ordinary step-by-step debugging may miss them. Capturing the right context helps reveal what happened when the problem occurred.

intermittent-issue-debugging — Skill by aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts

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.

Any agent

npx skills add aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts --skill intermittent-issue-debugging

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/intermittent-issue-debugging/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/intermittent-issue-debugging)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/intermittent-issue-debugging"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/intermittent-issue-debugging/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/intermittent-issue-debugging"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts/intermittent-issue-debugging.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 34 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 524 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

Socket pass 18 Mar 2026
Snyk pass 4 Mar 2026

How audits are shown

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00034	$0.00524
Opus 5.5	$0.00014	$0.00210
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00007	$0.00105
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00052

Measured 2mo ago against content hash be5f5397023f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

intermittent-issue-debugging 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 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (scripts/scaffold-tests.sh, templates/test-template.js), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

skills/intermittent-issue-debugging/SKILL.md · 89 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 89 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Overview

Intermittent issues are the most difficult to debug because they don't occur consistently. Systematic approach and comprehensive monitoring are essential.

When to Use

Sporadic errors in logs
Users report occasional issues
Flaky tests
Race conditions suspected
Timing-dependent bugs
Resource exhaustion issues

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

// Strategy 1: Comprehensive Logging
// Add detailed logging around suspected code

function processPayment(orderId) {
  const startTime = Date.now();
  console.log(`[${startTime}] Payment start: order=${orderId}`);

  try {
    const result = chargeCard(orderId);
    console.log(`[${Date.now()}] Payment success: ${orderId}`);
    return result;
  } catch (error) {
    const duration = Date.now() - startTime;
    console.error(`[${Date.now()}] Payment FAILED:`, {
      order: orderId,
      error: error.message,
      duration_ms: duration,
      error_type: error.constructor.name,
      stack: error.stack,
    });
    throw error;
  }
}

// Strategy 2: Correlation IDs
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide	Contents
Capturing Intermittent Issues	Capturing Intermittent Issues
Common Intermittent Issues	Common Intermittent Issues
Systematic Investigation Process	Systematic Investigation Process
Monitoring & Prevention	Monitoring & Prevention

Best Practices

✅ DO

Follow established patterns and conventions
Write clean, maintainable code
Add appropriate documentation
Test thoroughly before deploying

Read the full file on GitHub · 89 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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.

2mo ago First seen · 89 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A be5f5397023f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

intermittent-issue-debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository aj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts (376 stars, last pushed 8mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 524 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-03.

Debugging Testing

intermittent-issue-debugging next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
intermittent-issue-debuggingaj-geddes/useful-ai-prompts	Skill	376	8mo ago	MIT	A	34	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingopen-metadata/OpenMetadata	Skill	16k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	37	Claude Code
log-error-digestzebbern/claude-code-guide	Skill	4.7k	3d ago	MIT	A	71	Claude Code, Codex
cwv-optimizeradobe/skills	Skill	319	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	112	Claude Code
ci-fixersipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein	Skill	1.2k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	15	Claude Code, Codex
incident-response-incident-responsermyndharis/antigravity-skills	Skill	1.9k	23d ago	MIT	A	36	Claude Code
triaging-web-analytics-supportPostHog/posthog	Skill	41k	yesterday	none	A	151	Claude Code, Codex

intermittent-issue-debugging