systematic-debugging

systematic-debugging is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from hams-ollo/zen-agent-skills. It costs 209 tokens per session (5,154 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A debugging workflow that establishes the named cause of a defect, test failure, build failure, or unexpected behavior before anyone writes a fix. It reproduces the problem, finds where behavior diverges, and tests one possible cause at a time.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate defects, intermittent tests, build failures, and unexpected behavior when the cause is not yet known.
Why use it?
A visible failure may come from a different part of the system than the reported symptom. Establishing the cause first reduces the risk of fixing the wrong thing or declaring a flaky failure solved.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents); mentions AGENTS.md.

Good fit Use it to investigate defects, intermittent tests, build failures, and unexpected behavior when the cause is not yet known.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hams-ollo/zen-agent-skills/systematic-debugging
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.

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

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 systematic-debugging

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hams-ollo/zen-agent-skills/systematic-debugging.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hams-ollo/zen-agent-skills/systematic-debugging)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hams-ollo/zen-agent-skills/systematic-debugging"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hams-ollo/zen-agent-skills/systematic-debugging.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 209 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,154 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 $0.00209 $0.05154
Opus 5 $0.00105 $0.02577
Sonnet 5 $0.00042 $0.01031
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00515

Measured 3d ago against content hash 9a4fa8bdbcb1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

systematic-debugging 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.

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.

note: fetched with urllib and digested with hashlib on the retrieved date, at 9,465 bytes. The digest pins upstream as of that date; this file is an adaptation and is expected to differ.
.agents/skills/systematic-debugging/SKILL.md · 357 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 357 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

systematic-debugging

Turn a reported defect into a named cause with the evidence that established it, distinct from the symptom that was reported, and stop there.

This skill is a draft. It ships with no profile and reaches no adopter until it has been used on a real defect and blessed, per the contribution bar in the target repository's AGENTS.md.

When to use

  • A defect, test failure, build failure, or unexpected behavior arrives and nobody has established why it happens.
  • A test passes sometimes and fails other times, and somebody is about to call it fixed.
  • A failure surfaces in one component and may originate in another.
  • An agent working a task in isolation meets a failure its task file does not describe, and needs to tell a defect it introduced from one it uncovered.
  • A task file is about to be written about a symptom. This is the step that belongs in between.

When not to use

  • You want the defect fixed. This skill does not fix anything, and it will not be talked into it. The fix is a task, and fix-batch dispatches it.
  • You want the regression test written. That is test-author. This names the observable that test must pin, and stops.
  • You want the task file written. That is new-task, which this feeds.
  • You want to know whether a fix worked. That is verifier-agent.
  • You want the code judged. A cause sitting in ugly code is still just the cause; house-review owns quality.
  • You want to know whether the defect is worth fixing. That is a priority call, it belongs to the author, and it is expressed on the task file rather than here.
  • The thing that went wrong is the agent rather than the repository. This diagnoses defects in a repository under work, not misfires of the harness running it. A run that has been confused by its own context is a different problem with a different answer, and pointing this procedure at it produces a confident cause for a defect that is not in the code.
  • The cause is already established and agreed. Skip to whichever skill acts on it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 357 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. 3d ago First seen · 357 lines · 209 tokens per session scan A 9a4fa8bdbcb1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

systematic-debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository hams-ollo/zen-agent-skills (2 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 209 tokens to every session and 5,154 once invoked, about $0.0010 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 2026-09-04.

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