debug-playbook

debug-playbook is a skill for Claude Code from atuljha23/holocron. It costs 34 tokens per session (630 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to designing software monitoring so logs, traces, and measurements explain what happened. It covers structured logs, trace spans, metrics, request identifiers, and rules for safe instrumentation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when adding a feature, reviewing a service, designing monitoring, or investigating a production issue.
Why use it?
Unclear or incomplete monitoring makes production problems difficult to investigate, especially when the service is failing at night or under real traffic.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the holocron plugin — 11 skills, 24 commands, 14 agents, 6 hooks shipped together

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/atuljha23/holocron/debug-playbook
Any agent
npx skills add atuljha23/holocron --skill debug-playbook
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/atuljha23/holocron

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install holocron, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 24 commands, 14 agents, 6 hooks.

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.

agentmods badge for debug-playbook

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/atuljha23/holocron/debug-playbook.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/atuljha23/holocron/debug-playbook)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/atuljha23/holocron/debug-playbook"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/atuljha23/holocron/debug-playbook.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 630 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 5.1 $0.00034 $0.00630
Opus 5 $0.00017 $0.00315
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00126
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00063

Measured 5d ago against content hash 980722cbb694, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

debug-playbook 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 5d 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/debug-playbook/SKILL.md · 79 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 79 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Debug playbook

The order of operations matters more than the tools.

1. Reproduce

Nothing else is useful until you can make the bug happen on demand.

  • Exact command / action / input that triggers it
  • Minimum conditions — strip away anything not required
  • If you can't repro, narrow: which environments? which users? which data? which times?
  • Unreproducible bugs are intermittent bugs, which are race / env / state leaks — treat them as such.

2. Hypothesize

List 2–3 concrete theories. For each:

  • What you think is happening (one sentence)
  • What observation would confirm it
  • What observation would kill it

If you have only one hypothesis, you're not thinking hard enough — or it's so obvious you should skip to step 4.

3. Probe

Add the cheapest probe that separates your top two hypotheses.

  • A targeted log line > reading the code again
  • git bisect when the timeline is wide and the test is binary
  • strace / dtrace / perf when the surface is the runtime, not the code
  • Differential execution — run on a known-good input and a known-bad input, diff the trace

Resist the urge to add logs everywhere. Add one at the pivot point.

4. Locate

When observation singles out the hypothesis, point at the line. Not the region — the line.

Ask: why does this line break? What invariant did we assume here that isn't true?

5. Fix

Minimum change that resolves the root cause. Nothing adjacent.

  • Not: "add a try/catch so we don't see the error"
  • Not: "bump the retry so it eventually succeeds"
  • Not: "rewrite this section while I'm here"

6. Guard

Add a test that fails without your fix and passes with it. The test should target the condition, not mimic the scenario.

Anti-patterns

  • Shotgun debugging — changing five things, one passed. Revert four of them and find which one.
  • Bandaid reflex — catching exceptions you don't understand. You're hiding the bug, not fixing it.
  • Upgrade cure — "upgrading the dep fixed it". Maybe. Or maybe it re-broke differently. Read the changelog.
  • "Works on my machine" — an environment bug. Find the environmental difference.
  • Adding retries — every retry hides a bug you didn't diagnose.

Read the full file on GitHub · 79 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. 5d ago First seen · 79 lines · 34 tokens per session scan A 980722cbb694

Subscribe to this mod's changes

debug-playbook is a skill published in the GitHub repository atuljha23/holocron (2 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 34 tokens to every session and 630 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 2026-08-31.

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