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.
npx agentmods add skills/rana/skills/cognitive-debugnpx skills add rana/skills --skill cognitive-debuggit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rana/skillsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rana/skills/cognitive-debug)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rana/skills/cognitive-debug"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rana/skills/cognitive-debug.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00056 | $0.00582 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00028 | $0.00291 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00011 | $0.00116 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00058 |
Grade A, and why
cognitive-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 5d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 52 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Examine the conversation history and any relevant project context.
Cognitive Debugging
Target: $ARGUMENTS
Step 1: State the Conclusion
What was concluded, decided, or produced? State it precisely — the output of the reasoning, not the intent.
Step 2: Trace the Reasoning Chain
Walk backward through the reasoning that led to the conclusion. For each link:
- What observation or input triggered this step?
- What reasoning connected it to the next step?
- Was this reasoning from mechanism (how things actually work) or from pattern (how things usually seem)?
Step 3: Identify Breakpoints
Find where the reasoning diverged. Common failure modes:
- Fear-driven reasoning: Protecting against what might go wrong instead of tracing what actually happens. "This could deadlock" without verifying the mechanism.
- Premature compression: Jumping to "X means Y" without tracing the full chain. Compressing a nuanced situation into a simple (wrong) conclusion.
- Pattern-matching over mechanism: Treating a similar-looking situation as identical without checking whether the similarity is structural or superficial.
- Coherence drive: Resolving a tension prematurely because ambiguity felt uncomfortable. Picking an answer to have an answer.
- Associative momentum: Following one line of reasoning past where it stopped being productive. Continuing to elaborate a wrong model instead of stepping back.
- Solution orientation: Jumping to fix something before understanding whether it's actually broken.
Step 4: Corrective Questions
For each breakpoint, propose the question that would have redirected:
- "What does the code/system/mechanism actually do here?"
- "Am I reasoning from fear or from observation?"
- "What's the simplest experiment that would falsify this concern?"
- "What would happen if I traced this with pencil and paper?"
- "First understand what IS before worrying about what MIGHT BE."
Step 5: Corrected Path
Trace the reasoning again with the corrective questions applied. Where does it lead differently?
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.
- 5d ago First seen · 52 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A 52c6a223aa57
cognitive-debug is a skill published in the GitHub repository rana/skills (1 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 56 tokens to every session and 582 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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