sidecar-smoke-suite-reveals-upstream-bugs

sidecar-smoke-suite-reveals-upstream-bugs is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from chen3feng/agent-skills. It costs 37 tokens per session (2,779 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A method for using a separate end-to-end test project to find bugs in an upstream library, build tool, or framework. It focuses on fixing the upstream code when real projects expose problems that unit tests miss.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when a sidecar project fails against real example projects or plugin hosts even though the upstream unit tests pass. It guides the decision to fix the upstream project before adding or changing the sidecar test.
Why use it?
It prevents downstream tests from hiding an upstream defect with a workaround. It helps distinguish a fixture problem from failures caused by startup scripts, environment differences, or integration behavior.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it when a sidecar project fails against real example projects or plugin hosts even though the upstream unit tests pass. It guides the decision to fix the upstream project before adding or changing the sidecar test.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/chen3feng/agent-skills/sidecar-smoke-suite-reveals-upstream-bugs
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 chen3feng/agent-skills --skill sidecar-smoke-suite-reveals-upstream-bugs
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/chen3feng/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

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README.md
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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.

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Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/chen3feng/agent-skills/sidecar-smoke-suite-reveals-upstream-bugs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/chen3feng/agent-skills/sidecar-smoke-suite-reveals-upstream-bugs.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,779 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 $0.00037 $0.02779
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.01389
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00556
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00278

Measured 12d ago against content hash 94b5ff6579e7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sidecar-smoke-suite-reveals-upstream-bugs 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 12d 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/sidecar-smoke-suite-reveals-upstream-bugs/SKILL.md · 244 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 244 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Sidecar smoke suites reveal upstream bugs — handshake order matters

When to use

You maintain an upstream library / build tool / framework and a separate sidecar repository that consumes it end-to-end against real fixture projects (an integration workspace, example repo, regression harness, plugin host, ...).

You are either:

  1. About to add a new suite to the sidecar and it fails on a real host in a way that looks like an upstream bug — not a bug in the fixture; or
  2. Already triaging such a failure and asking yourself "do I work around this in the sidecar, or fix upstream?".

Signal phrases: "it works in upstream's own tests but breaks here", "the unit tests never hit this path", "the failure only shows up on macOS / on ubuntu-22.04 / without python on PATH".

This skill is about what to do with the discovery, not about how to paper over it. For the paper-over-then-clean-up flow, see reverse-cleanup-after-upstream-fix.

Problem

Unit tests in the upstream repo protect the functions they cover, but they rarely exercise:

  • The bootstrap shell a tool emits (a #!/bin/sh wrapper, an exec python -m … launcher) — because the unit test process already has python / sh / the right PATH.
  • Environment assumptions of the deployed artifact — python vs python3, GNU sed vs BSD sed, /usr/bin/gcc being Apple Clang.
  • Cross-platform skew between the CI matrix and real user hosts — the CI runner has python on PATH, macOS 14 does not.
  • The composition of features — unit tests cover py_library alone and py_test alone; neither catches a launcher bug that only manifests when a py_test runs a real subprocess that itself runs a shell.

A sidecar repo that builds real fixtures with the real tool on a real host finds these bugs by existing. The moment you add a second language / a second platform / a second Python minor, the uncovered path light up.

Read the full file on GitHub · 244 lines

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. 12d ago First seen · 244 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A 94b5ff6579e7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sidecar-smoke-suite-reveals-upstream-bugs is a skill published in the GitHub repository chen3feng/agent-skills (5 stars, last pushed 4mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 2,779 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.