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 skills add borhen68/SkillEngine --skill debugging-and-error-recoverygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/borhen68/SkillEngineWrote 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/borhen68/skillengine/debugging-and-error-recovery)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/borhen68/skillengine/debugging-and-error-recovery"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/borhen68/skillengine/debugging-and-error-recovery/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/borhen68/skillengine/debugging-and-error-recovery"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/borhen68/skillengine/debugging-and-error-recovery.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00069 | $0.03084 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00028 | $0.01234 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00014 | $0.00617 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00308 |
Grade A, and why
debugging-and-error-recovery 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 — 348 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Debugging and Error Recovery
Overview
The most expensive debugging session is the one that never happens because someone guessed the fix, shipped it, and created three new bugs in the process. Debugging is not intuition — it's a systematic process of elimination. The best engineers aren't the ones who never write bugs; they're the ones who can find and fix any bug in bounded time.
The debugging contract: When something breaks, stop adding features immediately. Preserve evidence. Reproduce the failure. Isolate the minimum trigger. Fix the root cause, not the symptom. Guard against regression. Every skipped step is a debt that compounds.
Real-world impact: Teams that follow structured debugging resolve incidents 3x faster than teams that guess. The "quick fix" that bypasses root-cause analysis returns as a production outage — usually at 3 AM, usually worse than the original problem.
When to Use
- Tests fail after a code change
- The build breaks
- Runtime behavior doesn't match expectations
- A bug report arrives
- An error appears in logs or console
- Something worked before and stopped working
The Stop-the-Line Rule
When anything unexpected happens:
1. STOP adding features or making changes
2. PRESERVE evidence (error output, logs, repro steps)
3. DIAGNOSE using the triage checklist
4. FIX the root cause
5. GUARD against recurrence
6. RESUME only after verification passes
Don't push past a failing test or broken build to work on the next feature. Errors compound. A bug in Step 3 that goes unfixed makes Steps 4-10 wrong.
Iron Rules
These target the debugging failure modes specific to AI agents. Each is absolute — no time pressure overrides them.
- No fix before a reproduction. A plausible diagnosis is a hypothesis, not a finding. If you can't make the failure happen on demand, you can't know your fix works — you can only hope.
- Change one variable at a time. If you changed three things and the bug disappeared, you don't have a fix — you have two unnecessary changes and an unverified guess. Revert and isolate.
- Never suppress the signal. Wrapping in try/catch, increasing a timeout, adding a retry, or loosening a check to make an error disappear is symptom suppression, not a fix. Each of these is only valid when you can state why the underlying cause makes it the correct response.
- "It works now" without "because" is not fixed. If you can't explain in one sentence why it broke, the bug is still there — you've just stopped seeing it. Prove causality: revert the fix, confirm the failure returns, re-apply.
- Re-run the original failure, verbatim. "This should fix it" is a prediction. The exit gate is the original failing command rerun with output showing it now passes — plus the full suite for regressions.
What ships with it
1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.
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 · 348 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A 6caf9f495ce1
debugging-and-error-recovery is a skill published in the GitHub repository borhen68/SkillEngine (17 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 3,084 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-30.
Other skills, from other repositories
debugging-and-error-recovery
A systematic debugging procedure for finding the underlying cause of failed tests, broken builds, bugs, and unexpected behavior. It emphasizes reproducing the problem, preserving evidence, fixing the cause, and checking the fix.
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debugging-and-error-recovery
Guides systematic root-cause debugging. Use when tests fail, builds break, something that worked yesterday broke, behavior doesn't match expectations, or you encounter any unexpected error. Use when you need to figure out what broke and why — a systematic approach to finding and fixing the root cause rather than…
error-handling
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debugging-methodology
Systematic root cause analysis for production and development bugs. Hypothesis-driven debugging — never guess-and-check.