el-vaporub

el-vaporub is a skill for Claude Code from mcasillas17/mexican-mom. It costs 71 tokens per session (921 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A first-pass checklist for investigating a failure by ruling out stale local state. It checks unsaved files, unrestarted processes, old caches or build output, and the wrong branch, worktree, or file.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it at the start of a failure investigation to re-read files, identify processes, clean and rebuild artifacts, and verify the current branch and working directory.
Why use it?
Many surprising failures come from testing something different from what you think you changed. This checklist helps separate those local mistakes from problems in the system itself.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the mexican-mom plugin — 24 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it at the start of a failure investigation to re-read files, identify processes, clean and rebuild artifacts, and verify the current branch and working directory.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mcasillas17/mexican-mom/el-vaporub
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 mcasillas17/mexican-mom --skill el-vaporub
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mcasillas17/mexican-mom

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install mexican-mom, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 24 skills.

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 el-vaporub

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mcasillas17/mexican-mom/el-vaporub/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mcasillas17/mexican-mom/el-vaporub)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mcasillas17/mexican-mom/el-vaporub"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mcasillas17/mexican-mom/el-vaporub/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 el-vaporub

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mcasillas17/mexican-mom/el-vaporub"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mcasillas17/mexican-mom/el-vaporub.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 71 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 921 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 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 $0.00071 $0.00921
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00461
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00184
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00092

Measured 12d ago against content hash 94f1be0128be, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

el-vaporub 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 12d 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.

skills/el-vaporub/SKILL.md · 77 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 77 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

¿Te duele? Ponte Vaporub

Before you theorize, rule out the mess you made yourself.

Rule

Most surprising failures are the agent's own stale state, not the system's behavior. So you run one cheap ladder of checks first, once, before forming any theory — and then you never run it again on that same unchanged failure. The single pass is the remedy; a second pass is a substitute for thinking.

Procedure

Run every rung once, in order. Each rung has a check and a tell — the tell is how you know whether that rung was the problem.

  1. Unsaved file. Re-read the file you edited from disk. Tell: the edit is missing or the content differs from what you believe you wrote.

  2. Stale process. Identify the running process, server, watcher, or REPL and restart it. Tell: it was started before your edit, or its log shows no reload.

  3. Stale cache or artifact. Clear the relevant build, module, bundler, or test cache and rebuild. Tell: the failure changes or disappears after the clean rebuild.

  4. Wrong branch or worktree. Check the current branch, the working directory, and whether another worktree or checkout of this repo exists. Tell: you are not on the branch the change landed on, or the running path is not the path you edited.

  5. Wrong file. Confirm the file being executed is the file you edited — resolved import path, installed vs. local copy, dist/ vs. src/, a shadowing duplicate. Tell: two files match the name, or the import resolves elsewhere.

  6. Outdated generated output. Compare the timestamp of compiled, generated, or transpiled output against its source. Tell: the output is older than the source.

  7. The ladder is now spent. Whatever you found, reconcile it and re-run the failing thing exactly once. If it still fails, the cause is real. Stop guessing at state: read the actual error, form a theory, and gather evidence for it.

Evidence

Name the rungs and what each one showed, so nobody — including you — is tempted to climb it twice:

Read the full file on GitHub · 77 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. 12d ago First seen · 77 lines · 71 tokens per session scan A 94f1be0128be

Subscribe to this mod's changes

el-vaporub is a skill published in the GitHub repository mcasillas17/mexican-mom (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 71 tokens to every session and 921 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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