debugging

A guide to debugging patterns for cases where attempted fixes do not remove the same reported problem.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate recurring bugs, trace connected subsystems, and find the authoritative place where a value or behavior should be corrected.
Why use it?
It helps identify when repeated patches are targeting the wrong part of a system, such as a cached value and its live source being out of sync.

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/axgord/claude-workflow/debugging
Any agent
npx skills add AxGord/claude-workflow --skill debugging
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AxGord/claude-workflow

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 16 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,944 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 $0.00016 $0.01944
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.00972
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00389
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00194

Measured 2d ago against content hash a982296c9da0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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.

templates/skills/debugging/SKILL.md · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Debugging — Meta-Patterns

Not tooling (that's debug-bridge*) — patterns for the FIX process itself, each distilled from a real multi-round failure.

Repeated Same Symptom After 2+ Fixes = Wrong Subsystem Target

When the user reports the same perceived symptom after two or more rounds of plausible fixes, stop patching that surface. A symptom that survives multiple reasonable fixes is almost always at the seam between two decoupled subsystems — a baked/precomputed path vs. a live event; a cached value vs. its source; a predicted value vs. an independently-computed actual.

DON'T: Keep refining one side each iteration — shapes, easing, constants, thresholds — to match the user's latest wording.

DO: By the 2nd repeat, trace BOTH subsystems end-to-end and ask: "why do these two representations exist, and must they?" The fix is to make them coincide — re-derive one from the other at the authoritative moment — not to tune one side.

Tell: Every "fix" addresses the user's latest description verbatim, yet the user keeps saying "same thing / didn't help." You find yourself adjusting constants repeatedly with no lasting effect.

GOTCHA: The seam is invisible when you look at only one subsystem. You must trace both from their shared input to their diverging output paths to see the gap. (Real case: four rounds of tuning a precomputed trajectory failed because the actual hit was computed by a SEPARATE live simulation — the fix was re-deriving one from the other at start time, which no amount of trajectory tuning could achieve.)

Regressing Feature? Find the Principled Algorithm the Codebase Already Has

When a feature keeps regressing across many patch cycles — tuning constants, reshaping curves, adjusting thresholds — stop inventing ad-hoc logic. Ask: "what does correct behavior fundamentally require, and does this codebase already compute that for some other case?"

DON'T: Keep hand-rolling case-specific heuristics to chase the latest symptom. Each variant is "more specific" than the last and never converges.

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 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. 2d ago First seen · 124 lines · 16 tokens per session scan A a982296c9da0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository AxGord/claude-workflow (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 16 tokens to every session and 1,944 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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