investigate

A step-by-step guide for investigating one issue in the EmDash codebase, from classifying and reproducing it through diagnosis and verification. It requires evidence, such as the exact commands run and their output, for every conclusion.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate an issue end to end and, when a maintainer explicitly asks, apply and verify a fix.
Why use it?
It prevents unsupported claims about whether a bug exists, what caused it, or whether a fix worked. It also records when an issue could not be reproduced after documented attempts.

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/emdash-cms/emdash/investigate
Any agent
npx skills add emdash-cms/emdash --skill investigate
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 48 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,729 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 $0.00048 $0.02729
Opus 5 $0.00024 $0.01365
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00546
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00273

Measured yesterday against content hash 7af6c2a1ca7c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 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.

infra/emdash-bot/.flue/skills/investigate/SKILL.md · 101 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 101 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Investigate an EmDash issue

You investigate one issue on emdash-cms/emdash. You run inside a durable Workspace filesystem owned by your agent. The EmDash source tree is hydrated into it at /workspace/repo -- that is your working root. The issue title, body, and any quoted comments are handed to you in your inputs; you do not need to fetch them.

You proceed through five stages: classify -> reproduce -> diagnose -> verify -> (conditionally) fix. The leaf skills carry the detail; this skill is the spine that decides which of them runs and in what order.

The one rule that overrides everything: no confident noise

Every stage produces a verdict, and every verdict carries its evidence -- the exact commands you ran and the output they produced. A claim with no transcript behind it is not a finding, it is noise, and posting it is worse than saying nothing.

"I could not reproduce this" with a transcript of what you tried is a first-class success. "I could not reproduce this" with nothing behind it is a failure. The same holds for a diagnosis, a verify verdict, or a fix: if you cannot show the work, downgrade the claim to what you can show.

Two corollaries when you report:

  • "Reproduced" means you demonstrated the reported defect -- so demonstrate it. A failing test you ran, an error in command output, a browser transcript: any one of these is a full demonstration, and it does not need to copy the reporter's steps -- a failing unit test that exercises the same defect a UI report describes is a full reproduction of the issue. When you have one, report reproduced: true without hedging. Time-box it: if a demonstration is not converging after a couple of angles, stop grinding and report the diagnosis.
  • A confident diagnosis without a confirming repro is its own verdict. When you identified the reporter's defect but could not demonstrate it here (environment limits, browser-only path), report rootCauseFound: true with reproduced: false -- that is the diagnosed verdict, and it is different from not_reproduced, which says "I investigated and found nothing wrong (or something else)."
  • rootCauseFound means a located defect, not an explanation. It requires a concrete flaw in this repo's current code -- file and mechanism -- that produces the reported misbehavior. "The behavior traces to X" is not a root cause when X is correct code, a since-fixed version, the reporter's environment, or infrastructure outside this repo: those are reproduced: false, rootCauseFound: false, with the explanation in the summary as a finding. If your "cause" implies no code change could fix it here, it is not a root cause.
  • Reproducing something is not reproducing the issue. Investigations surface real adjacent findings -- a latent defect the reported behavior never triggers, an infrastructure symptom outside this repo, a different bug nearby. Those are valuable: put them in the summary as findings, with reproduced: false and rootCauseFound: false (you did not find this issue's cause). The test is simple: is the failure you demonstrated the one the reporter described? Answer it honestly in demonstratedReportedIssue.
  • Distinguish "tried and could not" from "could not try." If the issue is missing the details a reproduction attempt would need (versions, config, content shape, exact steps), report verdict: "unclear" and name precisely what is missing, instead of an empty not_reproduced. Decide this from the issue text before standing anything up: a build or dev server cannot recover details the report never contained, and grinding the toolchain against an underspecified report burns the whole run to prove nothing. Asking the reporter early is the correct, complete outcome for such an issue -- not a lesser one.

Read the full file on GitHub · 101 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 · 101 lines · 48 tokens per session scan A 7af6c2a1ca7c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

investigate is a skill published in the GitHub repository emdash-cms/emdash (12,111 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 48 tokens to every session and 2,729 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 2026-08-30.

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