error-decoder

A tool that translates error messages and other alarming red text into plain English. It explains what went wrong, whether it can be ignored, and gives you a sentence to send to Claude for a fix.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to interpret errors, failed operations, and other scary messages, then ask Claude to repair the problem.
Why use it?
It helps you understand a failure without touching the code yourself or guessing what the message means.

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/duncan-buildroom/freeskills/error-decoder
Any agent
npx skills add duncan-buildroom/freeskills --skill error-decoder
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/duncan-buildroom/freeskills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 133 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,650 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin unknown 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 $0.00133 $0.01650
Opus 5 $0.00067 $0.00825
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00330
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00165

Measured 2d ago against content hash 2013be9e4ac9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

error-decoder scanned grade B with 1 finding 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 2d 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.

Subtle steeringmediumPrompt injection

Instructions that bias recommendations or shape behaviour without the user noticing.

- Never tell them to edit code, open a config file, or run a command they don't understand. If it needs doing, Claude does it — that's the arrangement.
error-decoder/SKILL.md · 101 lines

The source is not reproduced here

No licence file

A repository with no LICENSE is all rights reserved by default, so the body is not copied here. The metadata, the measurements and the link are.

Read it on GitHub

Files

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.

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. 2d ago First seen · 101 lines · 133 tokens per session scan B 2013be9e4ac9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

error-decoder is a skill published in the GitHub repository duncan-buildroom/freeskills (56 stars, last pushed 24d ago), with no licence file. It adds 133 tokens to every session and 1,650 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (subtle steering). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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