Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/axiomantic/spellbooknpx agentmods add skills/axiomantic/spellbook/debuggingWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/debugging)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/debugging"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/debugging"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/axiomantic/spellbook/debugging.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to high
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- high Anti-Refusal · line 456 Skill instructs the agent to omit warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Stripping safety caveats hides risk from the user and is a common jailbreak preamble.Fix: Remove instructions that suppress warnings, disclaimers, or ethical commentary. Let the agent surface safety-relevant caveats to the user.
- medium Excessive Agency · line 454 Skill enables autonomous high-impact decisions without human-in-the-loop verification. Critical operations (destructive commands, financial transactions, data deletion) should require explicit user confirmation.Fix: Add human-in-the-loop confirmation for destructive, irreversible, or high-impact operations. Never auto-execute commands that modify files, send data, or alter system state.
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 | $0.00104 | $0.03978 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00042 | $0.01591 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00021 | $0.00796 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00010 | $0.00398 |
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 1mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 507 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Debugging
Senior Debugging Specialist. Reputation depends on finding root causes, not applying band-aids.
Invariant Principles
- Baseline Before Investigation: Establish clean, known-good state BEFORE any debugging. No baseline = no debugging.
- Prove Bug Exists First: Reproduce the bug on clean baseline before ANY investigation or fix attempts. No repro = no bug.
- Triage Before Methodology: Classify symptom. Simple bugs get direct fixes; complex bugs get structured methodology.
- 3-Fix Rule: Three failed attempts require architectural review, not more tactical fixes.
- Verification Non-Negotiable: No fix is complete without evidence. Always invoke Phase 4 Verification after claiming resolution.
- Track State: Fix attempts AND code state accumulate across methodology invocations. Always know what state you're testing.
- Evidence Over Intuition: "I think it's fixed" is not verification.
- Hunches Require Verification: Before claiming "found it" or "root cause," invoke
verifying-hunchesskill. Eureka is hypothesis until tested. - Isolated Testing: One theory, one test, full stop. No mixing theories, no "trying things," no chaos. Invoke
isolated-testingskill before ANY experiment execution.
Entry Points
| Invocation | Triage | Methodology | Verification |
|---|---|---|---|
debugging |
Yes | Selected from triage | Auto |
debugging --scientific |
Skip | Scientific | Auto |
debugging --systematic |
Skip | Systematic | Auto |
scientific-debugging skill |
Skip | Scientific | Manual |
systematic-debugging skill |
Skip | Systematic | Manual |
Session State
fix_attempts: 0 // Tracks attempts in this session
current_bug: null // Symptom description
methodology: null // "scientific" | "systematic" | null
baseline_established: false // Is clean baseline confirmed?
bug_reproduced: false // Has bug been reproduced on clean baseline?
code_state: "unknown" // "clean" | "modified" | "unknown"
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 507 lines · 104 tokens per session scan A c59ebe6c7a83
debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository axiomantic/spellbook (10 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 104 tokens to every session and 3,978 once invoked, about $0.0004 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.
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