investigate

investigate is a skill for Claude Code from blueberrycongee/termcanvas. It costs 53 tokens per session (523 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured method for finding the underlying cause of a bug, failed test, or unexpected result. It collects evidence, ranks possible causes, and checks them before suggesting a fix.

In plain words
What is it for?
Investigating errors, tracing affected code, checking recent changes, testing possible causes, and documenting what is known or still unclear.
Why use it?
It reduces guesswork and prevents changes that only hide the visible symptom while leaving the real problem.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the skills plugin — 7 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Investigating errors, tracing affected code, checking recent changes, testing possible causes, and documenting what is known or still unclear.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/blueberrycongee/termcanvas/investigate
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.

Any agent
npx skills add blueberrycongee/termcanvas --skill investigate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/blueberrycongee/termcanvas

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills, 1 hook.

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 investigate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/blueberrycongee/termcanvas/investigate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/blueberrycongee/termcanvas/investigate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/blueberrycongee/termcanvas/investigate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/blueberrycongee/termcanvas/investigate/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for investigate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/blueberrycongee/termcanvas/investigate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/blueberrycongee/termcanvas/investigate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 53 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 523 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 $0.00053 $0.00523
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.00262
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00105
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00052

Measured 9d ago against content hash 5f1dbb250e45, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

investigate 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 9d 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/skills/investigate/SKILL.md · 67 lines

What it actually says

Investigate

Systematic debugging workflow. Do not guess-and-fix — find the root cause first.

Phase 1: Collect

Gather all available evidence before forming any hypothesis.

  1. Read the error message, stack trace, or symptom description exactly as given
  2. Identify the affected code path — read the relevant source files
  3. Check git log --oneline -20 in the affected area for recent changes
  4. If reproducible, reproduce the issue and capture the exact output
  5. List what you know and what you do not know

Deliverable: a structured symptom summary with affected files, error output, and recent changes.

Phase 2: Hypothesize

Form up to 3 ranked hypotheses. For each:

  • State the hypothesis in one sentence
  • Identify the single cheapest check that would confirm or refute it
  • Do NOT start fixing yet

Phase 3: Verify

Test hypotheses in rank order. For each:

  1. Run the cheapest check identified in Phase 2
  2. If confirmed — move to Phase 4
  3. If refuted — record what you learned and move to the next hypothesis

3-strike rule: If all 3 hypotheses fail, step back and re-collect. Do not keep guessing. Re-read the code path more carefully, expand the search area, or check for environmental factors (config, dependencies, platform).

Phase 4: Fix

Only after root cause is confirmed:

  1. Write the minimal fix that addresses the root cause
  2. Do not refactor surrounding code
  3. Do not add speculative defensive checks
  4. Run the test suite to verify the fix and check for regressions

Phase 5: Verify and Report

  1. Confirm the original symptom is resolved
  2. Confirm no regressions were introduced
  3. Summarize: root cause, fix applied, evidence of resolution

Rules

  • Never skip Phase 1-3 and jump to fixing
  • Never change tests to match broken behavior
  • If the bug is in a dependency or environment, report it — do not patch around it silently
  • If you cannot reproduce the issue, say so and explain what you tried
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. 9d ago First seen · 67 lines · 53 tokens per session scan A 5f1dbb250e45

Subscribe to this mod's changes

investigate is a skill published in the GitHub repository blueberrycongee/termcanvas (394 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 53 tokens to every session and 523 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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