debugging-workflow

debugging-workflow is a skill for Claude Code from personamanagmentlayer/pcl. It costs 91 tokens per session (2,306 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A debugging procedure that finds the cause of a software problem by reproducing it, testing possible explanations, and narrowing the search. It then fixes the problem behind a regression test, which checks that the same failure does not return.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps investigate crashes, unexpected behavior, flaky tests, environment differences, and performance or memory regressions.
Why use it?
It replaces guesswork with small experiments and gives intermittent failures, performance regressions, and production incidents a repeatable investigation process.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Good fit It helps investigate crashes, unexpected behavior, flaky tests, environment differences, and performance…

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/personamanagmentlayer/pcl/debugging-workflow
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 personamanagmentlayer/pcl --skill debugging-workflow
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/personamanagmentlayer/pcl

Made for: Claude Code.

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 debugging-workflow

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/personamanagmentlayer/pcl/debugging-workflow.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/personamanagmentlayer/pcl/debugging-workflow)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/personamanagmentlayer/pcl/debugging-workflow"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/personamanagmentlayer/pcl/debugging-workflow.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 91 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,306 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 $0.00091 $0.02306
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.01153
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00461
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00231

Measured yesterday against content hash 7599f3c8363c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

debugging-workflow 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.

stdlib/workflows/debugging-workflow/SKILL.md · 279 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 279 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Debugging Workflow

Debugging is a search over hypotheses, not an inspection of code. The fastest route to a cause is a sequence of experiments that each halve the space of possible explanations.

When to Use This Skill

  • A defect has been reported and the cause is unknown
  • A test fails intermittently
  • Behaviour differs between environments
  • A performance or memory regression appeared
  • Something worked before and does not now
  • The user asks "why does this happen?" about running code

If the cause is already known, skip this and fix it. This procedure is for the case where you do not yet know.

Core Concepts

Reproduce Before Reading

Until you can make the failure happen on demand, you cannot tell a fix from a coincidence. A reliable reproduction is the single highest-value artefact in debugging, and it is worth spending real time on. Everything after it is faster.

Hypothesis, Prediction, Experiment

Each step states a hypothesis, predicts an observable consequence, and runs the cheapest experiment that would refute it. Refutation is the goal: a test that can only confirm teaches nothing.

Hypothesis: the cache returns a stale tenant after a failover. Prediction: the returned object's tenant_id differs from the request's. Experiment: log both at the cache boundary for one request.

Bisection

Halve the search space rather than walking it. Bisect over commits (git bisect), over input (shrink the failing payload), over the stack (which layer still sees correct data), or over configuration (which flag flips it).

Cause, Not Symptom

The first explanation that makes the symptom disappear is usually not the cause. Keep asking what produced the state you found, until the answer is a decision someone made rather than a value that was wrong.

The Workflow

1. Capture the report precisely

What was expected, what happened, and the exact context: version, environment, input, timestamp, user. Vague reports cost more than they save. Get the trace or correlation id if there is one.

Read the full file on GitHub · 279 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 files 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. yesterday First seen · 279 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A 7599f3c8363c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

debugging-workflow is a skill published in the GitHub repository personamanagmentlayer/pcl (41 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 91 tokens to every session and 2,306 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-09-05.

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