investigate

investigate is a skill for Claude Code from dorayo/orchestrix-skills. It costs 33 tokens per session (887 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A root-cause debugging guide for investigating broken tests, bugs, and regressions before changing code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to reproduce failures, trace where a system goes wrong, compare changes with Git, reduce failing inputs, and test explanations by trying to disprove them.
Why use it?
It helps prevent random changes that make a failure disappear without fixing the underlying problem. Each proposed cause must be supported by observed evidence.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the orchestrix-skills plugin — 18 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to reproduce failures, trace where a system goes wrong, compare changes with Git, reduce failing inputs, and test explanations by trying to disprove them.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/dorayo/orchestrix-skills/investigate
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 dorayo/orchestrix-skills --skill investigate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dorayo/orchestrix-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install orchestrix-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 18 skills.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for investigate

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dorayo/orchestrix-skills/investigate/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/dorayo/orchestrix-skills/investigate)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dorayo/orchestrix-skills/investigate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dorayo/orchestrix-skills/investigate/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for investigate

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dorayo/orchestrix-skills/investigate"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dorayo/orchestrix-skills/investigate.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 33 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 887 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 $0.00033 $0.00887
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.00443
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00177
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00089

Measured 7d ago against content hash af76adf4a92d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

investigate 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 7d 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/investigate/SKILL.md · 84 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 84 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Investigate (Root Cause Before Any Fix)

Debugging is not "try changes until it passes". It is locating the mechanism.

Core principle: A fix you cannot explain mechanistically is not a fix — it is a coincidence that will regress.

The Iron Law

NO FIX WITHOUT A ROOT CAUSE STATED AS:
"X happens BECAUSE Y — evidenced by Z (something I observed this session)"

Process

  1. Reproduce. Find the exact command/steps that show the symptom, run them, capture the output verbatim. Read the error LITERALLY — the message usually says what is wrong, not what you assume is wrong. Cannot reproduce → that IS the finding (report the conditions tried; do not "fix" what you cannot see).
  2. Localize. Shrink the search space with evidence, not intuition:
    • git log/git bisect when it used to work — what changed?
    • Binary-search the pipeline: add temporary instrumentation (prints/asserts) at midpoints to find where good state becomes bad state.
    • Minimize the reproduction — smallest input that still fails.
  3. Hypothesize and FALSIFY. For each hypothesis, design the observation that would DISPROVE it, then run it. A hypothesis you only sought confirmation for is not tested. Two failed rounds on the same theory → the bug is in an assumption one level deeper (the config, the framework contract, the data, the environment) — widen, don't re-try harder.
  4. State the root cause in the iron-law form, plus:
    • the minimal fix scope (which file/function, what change class),
    • the regression test that would have caught it,
    • any OTHER symptoms this mechanism predicts (check them — a mechanism that doesn't explain all symptoms is incomplete).
  5. Revert your instrumentation. git diff must be clean when you finish.

Output: root_cause_report

# Root cause — <symptom, one line>

## Reproduction — exact command; fails with <output tail>.
## Mechanism — X happens because Y. Evidence: Z (file:line / captured output).
## Fix scope — <file(s)>, <change class>. Explicitly NOT needed: <what a shotgun fix would have touched>.
## Regression test — <the test to add so this cannot silently return>.
## Ruled out — <hypotheses falsified and how> (saves the next person re-walking them).

Read the full file on GitHub · 84 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. 7d ago Changed · +1 lines af76adf4a92d
  2. 11d ago First seen · 83 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A 076cc03e53cc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

investigate is a skill published in the GitHub repository dorayo/orchestrix-skills (2 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 887 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.

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