systematic-debugging

A step-by-step method for investigating bugs, failed tests, crashes, and other unexpected behavior. It requires reproducing the problem and isolating its root cause before changing code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to read errors and stack traces, create a minimal reproduction, test one hypothesis at a time, and report what was tried when several fixes fail.
Why use it?
It prevents guesses based only on an error message and makes it clear which change fixed the problem. It also reduces the risk of hiding the symptom while leaving the underlying bug.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/archive228/loopkit/systematic-debugging
Any agent
npx skills add Archive228/loopkit --skill systematic-debugging
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Archive228/loopkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 409 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 $0.00036 $0.00409
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00204
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00082
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00041

Measured 2d ago against content hash 74722b62f252, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

systematic-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 2d ago.

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/systematic-debugging/SKILL.md · 40 lines

What it actually says

Systematic Debugging

The single most expensive agent failure: seeing an error and immediately generating a "fix" based on the error type, without reading what actually happened. Don't.

The loop

  1. Read the whole error. The entire message and stack trace. A TypeError can mean a hundred different things — the trace tells you which one. Quote the exact line that throws.

  2. Reproduce it first. If you can't reproduce it, you can't verify a fix. Write the smallest input that triggers it. "I think this fixes it" is gambling, not debugging.

  3. Form one hypothesis, name it. "I think the value is null because the upstream call returns 204 with no body." State it before you touch anything.

  4. Change one thing. Test. Repeat. If you change three things and it works, you don't know which one fixed it — and the other two may have added new bugs.

  5. Fix the root cause, not the symptom. A null check that hides a null is not a fix. Find why it's null. The underlying bug will resurface differently if you only patch the crash.

Stop conditions

  • If 3 hypotheses fail, STOP and report: what you tried, what you saw, what you suspect. "I've tried X and Y, here's the output, I think it's Z but I'm not sure" beats 20 silent random attempts.
  • Never add a workaround you don't understand.

Output

End with: the root cause (one sentence), the minimal fix, and the test that now proves it.

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. 2d ago First seen · 40 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A 74722b62f252

Subscribe to this mod's changes

systematic-debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository Archive228/loopkit (753 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 409 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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