windbg-user-exception-triage

windbg-user-exception-triage is a skill for Claude Code from microsoft/win-dev-skills. It costs 69 tokens per session (1,142 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A WinDbg workflow for investigating structured crashes in native C or C++ user-mode programs. It covers applications, services, and user-mode driver hosts, including crashes inside a managed process caused by native code.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to examine access violations, heap corruption, stack overflows, fail-fast stops, and other native exceptions in a dump or WinDbg session.
Why use it?
It separates the actual exception context from an arbitrary selected thread and checks that matching program files and debugging symbols are available. This reduces the risk of blaming the wrong code or reading incomplete evidence.

Skill for Claude Code ✓ vendor

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

Part of the windbg plugin — 11 skills, 2 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to examine access violations, heap corruption, stack overflows, fail-fast stops, and other native exceptions in a dump or WinDbg session.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-exception-triage
About the project

microsoft/win-dev-skills is a collection of AI-agent instructions and tools for creating native Windows applications with WinUI 3 and the Windows App SDK. Windows developers use it to guide agents through app development tasks from scaffolding and design to testing, packaging, and release. The catalogue entries are its agents, skills, and plugin components.

microsoft/win-dev-skills · 472 stars · on GitHub

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 microsoft/win-dev-skills --skill windbg-user-exception-triage
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/win-dev-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install windbg, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 2 agents.

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 windbg-user-exception-triage

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-exception-triage/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-exception-triage)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-exception-triage"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-exception-triage/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 windbg-user-exception-triage

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-exception-triage"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/microsoft/win-dev-skills/windbg-user-exception-triage.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 69 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,142 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 $0.00069 $0.01142
Opus 5.5 $0.00028 $0.00457
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00014 $0.00228
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00114

Measured 8d ago against content hash dcd794ddc427, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

windbg-user-exception-triage 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 8d 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.

plugins/windbg/skills/windbg-user-exception-triage/SKILL.md · 99 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 99 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

User-Mode Exception Triage

Load windbg-diagnostic-method first if it is not already loaded in this conversation, and apply it throughout for evidence ranking, hypothesis testing, confidence calibration, independent review, and report validation. This skill adds the bug-family-specific commands and evidence requirements.

When to use

Start here for access violations, heap corruption, stack overflow, fail-fast, breakpoints, and other structured exceptions in a native application, service, or user-mode driver host process dump. This includes UMDF driver failures that occur in their user-mode host. Confirm the dump type from WinDbg; the filename extension alone does not distinguish user-mode from kernel-mode dumps.

Workflow

1. Establish the exception context

.exr -1
.ecxr
k
!analyze -v

Record the exception code, address, parameters, access type, registers, module, and stack. .ecxr selects the saved exception context when available. If no exception context was captured, report that limitation rather than treating the currently selected thread as the faulting thread.

Use matching binaries and PDBs for your modules and public Windows symbols. Investigate mismatches or truncated stacks before naming a failing source line.

2. Classify and choose an available investigation

Evidence Next step
0xC0000005 with allocation/free or overrun evidence windbg-user-heap-corruption-investigation
0xC0000374 heap corruption windbg-user-heap-corruption-investigation
0xC0000017, 0x8007000E, or an allocation-failure path windbg-user-virtual-memory-exhaustion
Lock/unlock failure following coroutine suspension windbg-user-mutex-held-across-co-await
A TTD recording is available and earlier mutation is in question windbg-user-ttd-reverse-debugging-triage
No crash exception and evidence of blocked work windbg-user-wait-chain-analysis
A kernel dump reports a bugcheck windbg-kernel-bugcheck-triage

Read the full file on GitHub · 99 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. 8d ago First seen · 99 lines · 69 tokens per session scan A dcd794ddc427

Subscribe to this mod's changes

windbg-user-exception-triage is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/win-dev-skills (472 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 69 tokens to every session and 1,142 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-10-08.

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