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.
npx agentmods add skills/bobbyjohnstx/tinycode/tracenpx skills add bobbyjohnstx/tinycode --skill tracegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bobbyjohnstx/tinycodeWhat 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 | $0.00017 | $0.02241 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00009 | $0.01120 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00003 | $0.00448 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00002 | $0.00224 |
Grade A, and why
trace 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 262 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Trace Skill
Use this skill for ambiguous, causal, evidence-heavy questions where the goal is to explain why an observed result happened, not to jump directly into fixing or rewriting code.
Use the tracer agent as the lane worker when available. If the tracer agent is unavailable, each lane should be run as a focused subagent (or as a sequential investigation pass) — the lane structure, evidence contract, and rebuttal round still apply. The goal is to make tracing a reusable operating lane: restate the observation, generate competing explanations, gather evidence in parallel, rank the explanations, and propose the next probe that would collapse uncertainty fastest.
Good entry cases
Use /trace when:
- Two or more genuinely different explanations could account for the observation AND you cannot yet determine which is correct from available evidence — this is the core entry gate
- The problem is causal: you need to explain why an observed result happened, not just fix it
- The failure is ambiguous enough that a single-lane diagnosis would miss real alternatives
- The analysis benefits from parallel evidence-gathering across competing hypotheses
Examples:
- runtime bugs and regressions
- performance / latency / resource behavior
- architecture / premortem / postmortem analysis
- scientific or experimental result tracing
- config / routing / orchestration behavior explanation
- "given this output, trace back the likely causes"
When Not to Use
- The root cause is already known and the task is to implement the fix — use
executor - The goal is to confirm a change works, not explain why something happened — use
verify - A single most-likely cause exists and competing hypotheses add no value — use
debug - The user explicitly wants code written or changed, not a causal explanation
- The failure is a straightforward error message with a single obvious cause (e.g. a missing import, a typo in a config key)
Examples
Good: "Auth works in dev but silently fails in prod — trace why" → Competing explanations: config mismatch vs. env-specific auth service vs. measurement error in the prod log query. Spawn 3 lanes.
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 262 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A 13c83df8b682
trace is a skill published in the GitHub repository bobbyjohnstx/tinycode (11 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 2,241 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 2026-08-30.
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