diagnose

diagnose is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from emiliosheinz/agent-skills. It costs 102 tokens per session (3,330 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A bug-investigation workflow that finds and verifies the underlying cause, then saves a proposed fix without changing the application code. It uses reproduction, ranked explanations, parallel investigation, and adversarial checking for difficult bugs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when the cause of a hard bug is unknown and needs a reproducible investigation, evidence-based hypothesis testing, and a concrete proposal for the eventual fix.
Why use it?
It separates understanding a bug from applying a change, which gives the user a reviewed fix proposal before implementation. This is useful for intermittent, subtle, or cross-system failures.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions subagents; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Claude Code.

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is 6 Report save the proposal to ./.specs/bugs/<name>.md for review.

Good fit Use it when the cause of a hard bug is unknown and needs a reproducible investigation, evidence-based hypothesis testing, and a concrete proposal for the eventual fix.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/emiliosheinz/agent-skills
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/emiliosheinz/agent-skills/diagnose

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 diagnose

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

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/emiliosheinz/agent-skills/diagnose"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/emiliosheinz/agent-skills/diagnose.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 102 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,330 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00102 $0.03330
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.01665
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00666
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00333

Measured 11d ago against content hash 23f8a65a6dd4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

diagnose scanned grade A 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 11d 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

2. **curl / HTTP script** against a running dev server.
diagnose/SKILL.md · 259 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 259 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Diagnose

Goal: find and verify the root cause of a bug, then save a concrete, actionable fix proposal as a persistent artifact.

Hard rule — you diagnose, you do not fix. Never edit application code to make the bug go away. The fix goes in the report as a proposal; applying it is a separate step, taken only after the user has reviewed. Temporary instrumentation (tagged debug logs, a throwaway harness) is allowed and gets cleaned up before you finish.

When to reach for it: when the cause is unknown and the bug is hard — intermittent, subtle, cross-system, or it already survived one wrong fix. Diagnose goes deep (parallel probes, adversarial confirmation) and stops at a reviewed proposal. For a bug you already understand and just want to fix, skip this and fix it directly.

Orchestration (subagent contract)

Diagnosis is where independent, parallel perspectives pay off most: an agent that grades its own reasoning tends to pass it, and hypotheses probe faster in parallel than one at a time. Use subagents under one contract:

  • One level of delegation. Subagents do not spawn subagents.
  • Stateless. Put everything a subagent needs in its prompt: the repro command, the one hypothesis it owns, the file:line evidence, what a pass/fail looks like. It shares none of your context.
  • Compact returns. A subagent returns a structured verdict (below), not raw logs. Anything over ~100 lines goes to a file; it returns the path.
  • Isolate shared state. Parallel probes are safe only when they do not fight over the same mutable resource (one dev server, one DB row, one port). Probes that need exclusive access run sequentially, or each in its own git worktree / fixture.
  • Workflow is an optional speed-up for dispatching the fan-out where the runtime supports it. Plain sequential subagent calls always work as a fallback — never require Workflow.
  • Match model tier and effort to each probe — it's the primary cost lever (below).
  • AskUserQuestion for intake, one question at a time, with a recommended default. Fall back to a single plain-text question. Never bundle unrelated questions.

Read the full file on GitHub · 259 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 11d ago First seen · 259 lines · 102 tokens per session scan A 23f8a65a6dd4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

diagnose is a skill published in the GitHub repository emiliosheinz/agent-skills (18 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 102 tokens to every session and 3,330 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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