dist-debug

A debugging method for distributed systems, where an observed failure can appear in one component even though another component caused it.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for cross-service failures and production incidents involving logs, unexpected state, intermittent behavior, scaling, or recent changes.
Why use it?
It traces backward from the symptom through component boundaries and communication paths to identify the original incorrect state or dependency.

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/langerrr/distributed-architect/dist-debug
Any agent
npx skills add Langerrr/distributed-architect --skill dist-debug
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Langerrr/distributed-architect

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 27 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 974 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 $0.00974
Opus 5 $0.00014 $0.00487
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00195
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00097

Measured yesterday against content hash ce0d0aff6c01, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

dist-debug 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.

skills/dist-debug/SKILL.md · 116 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 116 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

/dist-debug — Debug-Time Root Cause Analysis

Trace distributed system failures backward from symptom to root cause. In distributed systems, the symptom component and the cause component are often different. Trace backward, don't just fix where it hurts.

Arguments

  • $ARGUMENTS may contain a symptom description, error message, or log snippet

Step 1: Gather Symptoms

From $ARGUMENTS or by asking the user:

  • What's the observable behavior? (error message, unexpected state, performance issue)
  • Which component reported the error? (this is the SYMPTOM component)
  • When does it happen? (always, intermittently, under load, after a specific event)
  • Any recent changes? (new code, config change, scaling event)

Step 2: Load Project Topology

Load the topology file to understand the communication graph. The root cause is almost always at a boundary — knowing the boundaries narrows the search.

Step 3: Identify the Symptom Boundary

From the topology:

  • What components feed into the symptom component?
  • What data/state does the symptom component depend on from other components?
  • What communication paths lead to the symptom component?

Step 4: Backward Trace

Starting from the symptom, trace backward through the topology:

Symptom: [what's observed, in which component]
   <- Depends on: [state/data from component X]
      <- Which depends on: [operation in component Y]
         <- Which could fail if: [condition in component Z]

At each hop, ask:

  • Could this component be in an unexpected state?
  • Could the data arriving here be stale, missing, or corrupted?
  • Could timing/ordering explain the symptom?

Step 5: Anti-Pattern Match

Read the catalog entries from the plugin's catalog/ directory and check the symptom shape:

Symptom shape Likely anti-pattern
Rapid repeated failures from same component AP-1: Tight Retry Loop
Data missing that "should be there" AP-2: Lost Data at ACK
Operation marked failed but actually succeeded AP-3: Channel Conflation
Component making wrong decisions about another's state AP-4: Boundary State Leak
Way more retries than configured AP-5: Compounding Retry
Failures immediately after recovery AP-6: Premature State Transition

Read the full file on GitHub · 116 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 · 116 lines · 27 tokens per session scan A ce0d0aff6c01

Subscribe to this mod's changes

dist-debug is a skill published in the GitHub repository Langerrr/distributed-architect (1 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 27 tokens to every session and 974 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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