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 Caxson/proof-of-work --skill evidence-first-debugginggit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Caxson/proof-of-workWrote 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/caxson/proof-of-work/evidence-first-debugging)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/caxson/proof-of-work/evidence-first-debugging"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/caxson/proof-of-work/evidence-first-debugging.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 | $0.00077 | $0.00418 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00039 | $0.00209 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00015 | $0.00084 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00042 |
Grade A, and why
evidence-first-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 8d 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.
What it actually says
Evidence-First Debugging
Diagnosis is evidence, not guessing.
Rules
-
Read the logs / code first. Never state "it fails because X" before you have read the relevant logs and code. No log read → no conclusion.
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Suspect yourself first. Default hypothesis: your own code, logic, or angle is wrong — not the environment, permissions, or hardware. Rule out your own bug with evidence before blaming anything external. (Classic trap: retrying your own broken input code, then blaming "permissions" and quitting.)
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One story, not many. A different "cause" each turn means you are guessing. Stop and return to the evidence.
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Rank hypotheses with evidence. List candidate causes, each with the specific evidence that confirms or refutes it and a confidence level. Do not commit to a fix until the top hypothesis is supported by data.
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Fix the root, not the symptom. Solve the actual mechanism (e.g. "incomplete data"), not the single field the log printed. Never delete data or run on a degraded state just to make the error disappear — that creates new bugs downstream.
Leverage
Dispatch an INDEPENDENT subagent to investigate noisy areas or to adversarially challenge your conclusion. A fresh perspective is the fastest way out of "I kept ramming my own wrong assumption." For broad log/grep sweeps, offload to a subagent and keep only the findings in main context.
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.
- 8d ago First seen · 38 lines · 77 tokens per session scan A f8ae61a3b474
evidence-first-debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository Caxson/proof-of-work (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 418 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.
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