devflow-debugging

A step-by-step method for diagnosing unexpected test failures, software behavior, and production errors. It checks existing runbooks and past incidents before forming and testing a possible cause.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate bugs, regressions, failing tests, and differences between the expected and actual behavior of staging or production systems.
Why use it?
It reduces guesswork and prevents repeating investigations that the team has already documented. It also keeps debugging from jumping straight to an untested fix.

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/klausfreiberufler/devflow-mcp/devflow-debugging
Any agent
npx skills add KlausFreiberufler/devflow-mcp --skill devflow-debugging
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/KlausFreiberufler/devflow-mcp

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 61 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,305 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 $0.00061 $0.01305
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00652
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00261
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00130

Measured yesterday against content hash 65cb2f1fc122, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

devflow-debugging 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 yesterday.

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.

.codex-plugin/skills/devflow-debugging/SKILL.md · 125 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 125 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Skill: devflow-debugging

Iron-Law port of Superpowers systematic-debugging. The four phases are non-negotiable; skipping ahead leaves untested assumptions in the code base.

Sister skill (DF-316): run devflow-error-investigator FIRST to pull wiki signals relevant to the error (runbooks, affected ADRs, recent flows, similar past errors). Then come back here for the systematic 4-phase walk. Together they enforce: never debug from scratch what the wiki has already seen.

When to use

  • Test fails unexpectedly (not the planned RED of devflow-tdd)
  • Behavior on staging/prod doesn't match the spec or the test-suite
  • Reviewer flags a regression you can't immediately explain

Skip when: the failure is the expected RED of a TDD cycle — that belongs to devflow-tdd.

Process

1 · Investigation

Capture the bug surface area before forming any opinion:

  • What was observed? Exact error message, stack-trace, screenshot, or test output.
  • What was expected? Acceptance-criterion or contract that says it should be different.
  • Reproduction recipe? Commands or steps that trigger the bug deterministically.
  • First time? Or regression? Check git-blame on the suspected file; check the changelog.

If you cannot reproduce on demand: stop. Make reproduction work first — without it the next phases are guesswork.

2 · Pattern

Look for shape-matches in what you've seen before:

  • Have I (or another flow) seen this stack-trace? Search the project's flows + agent-logs.
  • Does the error message match a known runbook?Hook 4 (next section).
  • Does the failure mode (race, off-by-one, encoding, auth) suggest a class of bugs?

Hook 4 · Runbook Match (BEFORE Hypothesis)

GET /api/wiki/search?q=<error-message>&types=doc_page&document_type=runbook

Equivalent MCP: wiki_search({ q: errorMessage, types: ['doc_page'], document_type: 'runbook' }).

If a runbook matches:

  • Read it through. Symptoms, diagnosis, fix-steps.
  • If the fix-steps clearly apply → skip to Phase 4 (Fix) with a wiki-link [[runbook:<slug>]] in your commit message. Don't re-derive what the runbook already documents.
  • If the runbook is related but not exact → cite it in the discipline-token evidence as a partial match and continue to Phase 3.

Read the full file on GitHub · 125 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. yesterday First seen · 125 lines · 61 tokens per session scan A 65cb2f1fc122

Subscribe to this mod's changes

devflow-debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository KlausFreiberufler/devflow-mcp (1 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 61 tokens to every session and 1,305 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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