diagnose

diagnose is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from kevinnft/ai-agent-skills. It costs 66 tokens per session (1,685 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of diagnosing-bugs, MIT.

A structured method for finding the cause of difficult bugs and performance slowdowns. It uses a repeatable loop: reproduce the problem, reduce it, test explanations, measure the code, fix it, and add a regression test.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate failing behavior, slow code, broken requests, command-line failures, or browser problems.
Why use it?
It prevents guesswork and helps ensure that a fix does not allow the same problem to return.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to investigate failing behavior, slow code, broken requests, command-line failures, or browser problems.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/kevinnft/ai-agent-skills/diagnose
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 kevinnft/ai-agent-skills --skill diagnose
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kevinnft/ai-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 diagnose

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kevinnft/ai-agent-skills/diagnose/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kevinnft/ai-agent-skills/diagnose)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kevinnft/ai-agent-skills/diagnose"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kevinnft/ai-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/kevinnft/ai-agent-skills/diagnose"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kevinnft/ai-agent-skills/diagnose.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 66 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,685 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 81% 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 5.1 $0.00066 $0.01685
Opus 5 $0.00033 $0.00843
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00337
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00169

Measured 9d ago against content hash 22575d3bd4e1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

diagnose 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 9d 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.

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.

Origin

This is a copy

81% identical to diagnosing-bugs — 84 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/mattpocock/engineering/diagnose/SKILL.md · 123 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 123 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Diagnose

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

When exploring the codebase, use the project's domain glossary to get a clear mental model of the relevant modules, and check ADRs in the area you're touching.

Phase 1 — Build a feedback loop

This is the skill. Everything else is mechanical. If you have a fast, deterministic, agent-runnable pass/fail signal for the bug, you will find the cause — bisection, hypothesis-testing, and instrumentation all just consume that signal. 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 — try them 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) — drives the UI, 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.

Build the right feedback loop, and the bug is 90% fixed.

Read the full file on GitHub · 123 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 9d ago First seen · 123 lines · 66 tokens per session scan A 22575d3bd4e1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

diagnose is a skill published in the GitHub repository kevinnft/ai-agent-skills (14 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 66 tokens to every session and 1,685 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 81% identical to diagnosing-bugs, differing in 84 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

test-first-bugs

Enforces a test-driven bug-fixing workflow. Use when a user reports a bug, failing code, an error, or asks to fix something.

jamditis/claude-skills-journalism · 35 tokens

lsp-refactoring

Intelligent code refactoring using IDE-level tools (rename, find-references, go-to-definition), AST-aware pattern matching, and TDD verification. Use for safe, large-scale refactoring with precision.

ArabelaTso/Skills-4-SE · 46 tokens

fixing-bugs

Fix a bug using strict TDD — UNDERSTAND → REPRODUCE (RED) → VERIFY RED → FIX → VERIFY GREEN → VALIDATE → REFACTOR. Use when the user reports a bug, asks to fix something, mentions a Sentry/error/regression, or pastes a stack trace. Bugs require a failing test that proves the bug existed before any code change. For…

Cristhianzl/claude-skills-czl · 105 tokens

triage-issue

Invoked helper skill for deep bug diagnosis, usually delegated from /qa when a reported issue needs root-cause analysis and a TDD fix plan before implementation. Use when the cause is unclear, the bug is a regression, or the user explicitly wants diagnosis. Not for lightweight QA intake (use /qa) or already-clear…

chrislacey89/skills · 77 tokens

self-correcting-loop

Use when generated or modified ABAP code has syntax errors, ATC findings, test failures, or activation issues. Runs an iterative fix-check-fix loop until the code is clean, tested, and activated. Equivalent to a persistent development TDD cycle.

vigneshbarani24/sap-superpowers · 57 tokens

test-first-bugfix

Test-driven bug fixing — reproduce before you fix. Use this skill whenever the user reports a bug, describes unexpected behavior, says something is broken, mentions a regression, or asks you to fix an error. This includes phrases like "this is broken", "X doesn't work", "there's a bug in", "getting an error when", "it…

The-Artificer-of-Ciphers-LLC/skills-from-the-artificer · 138 tokens