diagnose-a-hard-bug

diagnose-a-hard-bug is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering. It costs 42 tokens per session (2,092 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of diagnosing-bugs, Apache-2.0.

A structured process for finding the cause of difficult bugs and slowdowns. It builds a clear pass/fail check, then tests possible causes step by step.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate broken, failing, throwing, or slow code, create a focused failing test, compare revisions, and add measurements when the cause is unclear.
Why use it?
It prevents guesswork and makes debugging easier to verify. It also requires secrets to be removed from shown commands, logs, and captured files.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the claude-code-engineering plugin — 47 skills, 1 command, 8 agents, 1 hook shipped together

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/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/diagnose-a-hard-bug
Any agent
npx skills add everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering --skill diagnose-a-hard-bug
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install claude-code-engineering, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 47 skills, 1 command, 8 agents, 1 hook.

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-a-hard-bug

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/diagnose-a-hard-bug.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/diagnose-a-hard-bug)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/diagnose-a-hard-bug"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering/diagnose-a-hard-bug.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 42 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,092 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. Scan, not verified.
Origin 91% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00042 $0.02092
Opus 5 $0.00021 $0.01046
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00418
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00209

Measured 3d ago against content hash 679b214f04f6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

diagnose-a-hard-bug 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 3d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/hitl-loop.template.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Phase 1 is done when the loop is **tight** and **red-capable**: you can name **one command** (a script path, a test invocation, a curl) that you have **already run at least once** (show the invocation and its output, red
Origin

This is a copy

91% identical to diagnosing-bugs — 6 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/diagnose-a-hard-bug/SKILL.md · 143 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 143 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Diagnosing Bugs

A discipline for hard bugs. Skip phases only when explicitly justified.

When exploring the codebase, read CONTEXT.md (if it exists) to get a clear mental model of the relevant modules, and check ADRs in the area you're touching.

Redact

This skill has you show commands, outputs and captured artifacts. Redact every secret first: write <REDACTED> in its place. Build loops against env vars, so the credential stays in the environment rather than in what you show. Captured artifacts carry auth headers: quote only the lines that carry the signal.

If the redacted output is not enough to diagnose the bug, say so and ask the user.

Phase 1: Build a feedback loop

This is the skill. Everything else is mechanical. If you have a tight pass/fail signal for the bug (one that goes red on this bug), you will find the cause; bisection, hypothesis-testing, and instrumentation all just consume it. If you don't have one, no amount of staring at code will save you.

Spend disproportionate effort here. Be aggressive. Be creative. Refuse to give up.

Ways to construct one, in roughly this order

  1. Failing test at whatever seam reaches the bug: unit, integration, e2e.
  2. Curl / HTTP script against a running dev server.
  3. CLI invocation with a fixture input, diffing stdout against a known-good snapshot.
  4. Headless browser script (Playwright / Puppeteer) that drives the UI and asserts on DOM/console/network.
  5. Replay a captured trace. Save a real network request / payload / event log to disk; replay it through the code path in isolation.
  6. Throwaway harness. Spin up a minimal subset of the system (one service, mocked deps) that exercises the bug code path with a single function call.
  7. Property / fuzz loop. If the bug is "sometimes wrong output", run 1000 random inputs and look for the failure mode.
  8. Bisection harness. If the bug appeared between two known states (commit, dataset, version), automate "boot at state X, check, repeat" so you can git bisect run it.
  9. Differential loop. Run the same input through old-version vs new-version (or two configs) and diff outputs.
  10. HITL bash script. Last resort. If a human must click, drive them with scripts/hitl-loop.template.sh so the loop is still structured. Captured output feeds back to you.

Read the full file on GitHub · 143 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. 3d ago First seen · 143 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A 679b214f04f6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

diagnose-a-hard-bug is a skill published in the GitHub repository everywan-dev/claude-code-engineering (2 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 2,092 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). It is 91% identical to diagnosing-bugs, differing in 6 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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