ce-debug

A diagnosis workflow for finding the root cause of bugs or failing software behavior, with an optional test-first fix.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate failures, connect the trigger to the symptom, choose whether to apply a fix, and verify the result with tests or other evidence.
Why use it?
It prevents guesswork and unrelated changes by checking one explanation at a time. It also defines when to stop trying fixes and report the evidence instead.

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/everyinc/compound-engineering-plugin/ce-debug
Any agent
npx skills add EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin --skill ce-debug
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 21 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,305 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 $0.00021 $0.03305
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.01653
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00661
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00331

Measured 2d ago against content hash c1242bd85d57, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ce-debug 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.

skills/ce-debug/SKILL.md · 117 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 117 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Debug and Fix

Find the root cause of a failure, then — when the user chooses to — fix it with test-first discipline.

Done when: the causal chain from trigger to symptom is stated with no gaps and file:line evidence, and either a verified fix has been handed off (PR, commit, or the user's chosen stop) or a diagnosis-only summary has been delivered. Escalate rather than persist: 2-3 hypotheses exhausted without confirmation, or 3 failed fix attempts, means diagnose why instead of trying again — that is the smart escalation references/investigate.md describes. One hypothesis, one change at a time; changing several to see what helps is shotgun debugging.

<bug_description> is whatever this skill was invoked with — a failure description, a mode: token, or an issue reference (#123, org/repo#123, an issue URL) — from the user or from a calling skill (ce-babysit-pr / lfg in mode:pipeline pass the failing jobs and log tails). Blank if nothing was provided.

Mode

Default is interactive: investigate, run the Phase 2 fix-choice gate, then the Phase 4 handoff.

mode:pipeline (set by an orchestrator such as ce-babysit-pr or lfg): run fully non-interactively and never call the blocking-question tool. Strip the token from <bug_description>, then read references/pipeline-mode.md and follow it — it overrides every "ask the user" point with a conservative default, replaces the Phase 2 fix-gate with "fix convergent bugs, defer divergent ones", and replaces the Phase 4 handoff with a structured return whose status is exactly one of fixed-and-pushed | fixed-not-pushed | diagnosed-no-fix | flaky-infra | needs-human. The caller branches on those exact spellings, so never rename, abbreviate, or add to them.

Blocking questions

Wherever this skill asks the user something, use the host's blocking question tool already in the current tool list (match by capability, not by a host-specific name). Presence in the current tool list is proof the tool exists; never call a user-facing question tool to discover whether it exists. If a matching tool is listed but unloaded, use the host's tool-discovery primitive to load that capability — do not search for another host's tool name. Fall back to numbered options on the host's chat surface only when no such tool is in the list or a real question call errors. Never silently skip the question, and never end a phase without a response.

Read the full file on GitHub · 117 lines

Files

What ships with it

7 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 · 117 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A c1242bd85d57

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ce-debug is a skill published in the GitHub repository EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin (24,696 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 3,305 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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