agents-debug

A troubleshooting guide for coding agents and the environments they run in. It examines traces, logs, errors, timeouts, and setup requirements to find likely causes.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate wrong answers, failed or slow tool calls, missing logs, deployment-time differences, memory recall problems, and a broken AgentCore command-line tool.
Why use it?
It helps separate problems in the agent, its tools, its deployment, or the command-line setup, so debugging is based on evidence instead of guesswork.

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/aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws/agents-debug
Any agent
npx skills add aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws --skill agents-debug
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 193 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 7,232 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00193 $0.07232
Opus 5 $0.00097 $0.03616
Sonnet 5 $0.00039 $0.01446
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00723

Measured 2d ago against content hash dd20ab6870ef, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

agents-debug scanned grade A with 1 finding 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

**When the default is occupied** (second dev session, a lingering process from a previous run, another service on 8080), the CLI **auto-increments** silently: 8080 → 8081 → 8082. A test harness or `curl` script hardcoded
plugins/aws-agents/skills/agents-debug/SKILL.md · 722 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 722 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

debug

Diagnose why your AgentCore agent or environment isn't working correctly.

When to use

  • Your agent is returning wrong answers or errors
  • Tool calls are failing or timing out
  • Agent works locally but fails after deploying
  • Logs aren't showing up in CloudWatch
  • The AgentCore CLI isn't working or environment seems broken
  • agentcore command not found or prerequisites are missing

Do NOT use for:

  • Deploy failures (CDK errors, IAM during deploy) → use agents-deploy
  • Scaffolding a new project → use agents-get-started
  • Measuring quality or setting up monitoring → use agents-optimize

Input

$ARGUMENTS is optional:

/agents-debug                      # interactive — describe what's wrong
/agents-debug traces               # read and explain recent traces
/agents-debug logs                 # search recent logs for errors
/agents-debug memory               # diagnose memory recall issues specifically
/agents-debug doctor               # check environment prerequisites

Process

Step 0: Determine problem type

If the developer's issue is about the CLI itself (command not found, prerequisites, environment setup), load references/doctor.md and follow its diagnostic checklist.

If the issue is about agent behavior (wrong answers, errors, timeouts, tool failures), continue with Step 1 below.

Step 1: Verify CLI version

Run agentcore --version. This skill requires v0.9.0 or later. If the version is older, tell the developer to run agentcore update before proceeding.

Step 2: Understand the symptom

Ask (or infer from context):

"What's happening?

  1. The agent returns an error message
  2. The agent returns a wrong or unhelpful answer
  3. A specific tool call is failing
  4. Memory isn't working (agent doesn't remember things)
  5. The agent is slow or timing out
  6. I want to understand what the agent did in a specific session"

Step 3: Read traces and logs automatically

Don't ask the developer to paste logs — read them directly.

Read the full file on GitHub · 722 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 722 lines · 193 tokens per session scan A dd20ab6870ef

Subscribe to this mod's changes

agents-debug is a skill published in the GitHub repository aws/agent-toolkit-for-aws (2,498 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 193 tokens to every session and 7,232 once invoked, about $0.0010 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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