debugging-protocol

debugging-protocol is a skill for Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI from irahardianto/rugged-gemini. It costs 27 tokens per session (878 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A structured method for investigating complex bugs, flaky tests, and intermittent failures through testable hypotheses, evidence, and root-cause analysis.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define a bug's symptoms and scope, plan reproducible checks, record results, determine the most likely cause, and propose fixes.
Why use it?
It replaces guesswork with a documented process that separates possible causes, validates them one at a time, and preserves useful evidence.

Skill for Claude CodeCodexGemini CLI

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/irahardianto/rugged-gemini/debugging-protocol
Any agent
npx skills add irahardianto/rugged-gemini --skill debugging-protocol
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/irahardianto/rugged-gemini

Made for: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI.

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 debugging-protocol

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/irahardianto/rugged-gemini/debugging-protocol.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/irahardianto/rugged-gemini/debugging-protocol)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/irahardianto/rugged-gemini/debugging-protocol"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/irahardianto/rugged-gemini/debugging-protocol.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 27 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 878 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 $0.00027 $0.00878
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00439
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00176
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00088

Measured 3d ago against content hash 7ba2d1a34d31, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

debugging-protocol 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 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.

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.

.gemini/skills/debugging-protocol/SKILL.md · 94 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 94 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Debugging Protocol

Rigorous framework: beyond ad-hoc troubleshooting to structured hypothesis → validation.

Workflow

1. Initialize

Copy template assets/debugging-session-template.mddocs/debugging/{issue}-{YYYY-MM-DD}-{HHmm}.md

2. Define Problem

  • Symptom: observable behavior vs expected
  • Scope: which components involved

3. Hypotheses

List distinct, testable hypotheses. Avoid vague guesses. Differentiate layers (frontend vs backend). Example: "race condition in UI state" vs "DB schema misconfiguration."

4. Validation Tasks

Per hypothesis:

  • Objective: prove/disprove what
  • Steps: precise, reproducible
  • Code pattern: exact command/query/script
  • Success criteria: what output confirms hypothesis

5. Execute & Document

Per task: status (✅ VALIDATED / ❌ FAILED / ⚠️ INCONCLUSIVE), findings (evidence), conclusion.

6. Root Cause

Synthesize: primary root cause, confidence level, proposed fixes.

Best Practices

  • Be specific ("grep 'Error 500' in /var/log/nginx/access.log" not "check logs")
  • Isolate variables: one change at a time
  • Validate assumptions first (config, versions)
  • Preserve evidence (trace IDs, timestamps, repro scripts)

Active Debugging Techniques

Binary Search for Regressions

When a regression has no obvious cause:

  1. Identify last known good state (commit, deploy, config change)
  2. git bisect startgit bisect bad (current) → git bisect good (known good)
  3. At each step: run failing test or reproduce symptom
  4. Result: exact commit that introduced the regression
  5. Root cause analysis on that commit's diff

Concurrency Debugging Checklist

For race conditions, deadlocks, and data races:

  • Identify all shared mutable state
  • Map lock acquisition order — look for cycles (deadlock)
  • Check for missing synchronization on shared variables
  • Verify atomic operations are used correctly
  • Test with race detectors (go test -race, -fsanitize=thread, TSAN)
  • Add stress tests: increase parallelism, add random delays
  • Check for time-dependent assumptions (sleep-based synchronization)

Read the full file on GitHub · 94 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 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 · 94 lines · 27 tokens per session scan A 7ba2d1a34d31

Subscribe to this mod's changes

debugging-protocol is a skill published in the GitHub repository irahardianto/rugged-gemini (5 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 27 tokens to every session and 878 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 2026-08-31.

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