debugging-troubleshooting

A seven-step method for diagnosing problems in code, systems, and workflows: reproduce, isolate, form a hypothesis, test, fix, verify, and learn.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for errors, crashes, incorrect results, slow performance, inconsistent data, broken integrations, and other unexpected behavior.
Why use it?
It reduces random trial and error by requiring evidence about the root cause before changing the system.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/dojogenesis/mcp/debugging
Any agent
npx skills add DojoGenesis/mcp --skill debugging
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/DojoGenesis/mcp

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,061 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00052 $0.03061
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01530
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00612
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00306

Measured yesterday against content hash 799f8151373b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

debugging-troubleshooting 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 yesterday.

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.

internal/skills/bundled/continuous-learning/debugging/SKILL.md · 408 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 408 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Debugging & Troubleshooting Skill

Version: 1.2 Author: Tres Pies Design Purpose: Systematic debugging and troubleshooting that finds root causes, not just patches symptoms.


I. Philosophy: Systematic Diagnosis

Debugging is systematic investigation, not random guessing. One change at a time, test, observe, learn. Intuition is useful but methodology prevents rabbit holes.

Core principle: You can't fix what you can't reproduce.


II. When to Use This Skill

  • Code behaves unexpectedly (errors, crashes, wrong output)
  • Performance degradation (slow queries, long build times)
  • Data inconsistency (state out of sync)
  • Integration failure (API returns errors, sync breaks)
  • Feature not working as expected (UI bug, logic error)

III. The 7-Step Debugging Workflow

Always follow these steps in order. Never jump to fixing without reproducing.

Step 1: Reproduce

Can the user reproduce the problem consistently?

  • Identify exact steps to trigger the issue
  • Run reproduction 3+ times
  • Note if it happens every time or intermittently
  • If intermittent, identify patterns (time of day, data size, user count, load)

If you can't reproduce it, you can't fix it. Invest time here.

Information Gathering Template:

## Debug: [Issue Title]

**Gathered:** [Date/Time]

**Error Message:**
[Exact error text]

**Stack Trace:**
[Copy relevant portion]

**Logs:**
[Key log lines with timestamps]

**Context:**
- What triggered the issue:
- Recent changes:
- Environment:
  - Node: [version]
  - Database: [version]
  - OS: [platform]

**Expected Behavior:**
[What should happen]

**Actual Behavior:**
[What actually happened]

Step 2: Isolate

Narrow the scope. Which component, file, function, or line?

Bisection strategy: When many variables exist, use binary search to narrow down:

  1. Split the system in half
  2. Test each half independently
  3. The half that fails contains the bug
  4. Repeat until you've isolated the specific component

Read the full file on GitHub · 408 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. yesterday First seen · 408 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A 799f8151373b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

debugging-troubleshooting is a skill published in the GitHub repository DojoGenesis/mcp (0 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 3,061 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 2026-08-31.