debugging

A set of practical guidelines for finding and fixing software problems.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to inspect errors, reproduce issues, isolate the failing area, add temporary logging, and review recent code changes.
Why use it?
It gives debugging work a repeatable path instead of relying on guesses, starting with logs and reliable reproduction before narrowing down the cause.

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/block/ai-rules/debugging
Any agent
npx skills add block/ai-rules --skill debugging
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/block/ai-rules

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 9 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 123 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 $0.00009 $0.00123
Opus 5 $0.00005 $0.00062
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00025
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00012

Measured yesterday against content hash db7d33e8790b, 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 yesterday.

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.

Example/ai-rules/skills/debugging/SKILL.md · 15 lines

What it actually says

Debugging Guidelines

When debugging issues in this codebase:

  1. Check logs first - Review application logs for error messages and stack traces
  2. Reproduce consistently - Ensure you can reliably reproduce the issue before attempting fixes
  3. Isolate the problem - Use binary search or divide-and-conquer to narrow down the root cause
  4. Add logging - Insert temporary debug statements to trace execution flow
  5. Check recent changes - Review recent commits that might have introduced the issue
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. yesterday First seen · 15 lines · 9 tokens per session scan A db7d33e8790b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository block/ai-rules (128 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 9 tokens to every session and 123 once invoked, about $0.0000 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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