Systematic Debugging

A four-stage method for finding the underlying cause of a software bug before changing the code. It provides a disciplined way to investigate errors and unexpected behavior.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when debugging application failures, incorrect results, or unexpected system behavior. It guides the work from observing the problem through identifying its root cause.
Why use it?
It helps prevent quick fixes that only hide symptoms or create new problems. The investigation produces a clearer basis for choosing a fix.

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/einverne/dotfiles/systematic-debugging
Any agent
npx skills add einverne/dotfiles --skill systematic-debugging
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/einverne/dotfiles

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 23 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,260 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. 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 $0.00023 $0.02260
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.01130
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00452
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00226

Measured 2d ago against content hash 48252adfa183, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

Systematic 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 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.

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.

claude/skills/debugging/systematic-debugging/SKILL.md · 296 lines

The source is not reproduced here

Licensed GPL-3.0

The repository is licensed GPL-3.0, which this catalogue does not treat as permission to reproduce the file. Read it at the source.

Read it on GitHub

Files

What ships with it

5 files 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 · 296 lines · 23 tokens per session scan A 48252adfa183

Subscribe to this mod's changes

Systematic Debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository einverne/dotfiles (121 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed GPL-3.0. It adds 23 tokens to every session and 2,260 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-08-30.

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