trace

trace is a skill for Claude Code from RobinNorberg/oh-my-copilot. It costs 18 tokens per session (2,121 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of trace, MIT.

An evidence-based investigation workflow for explaining why an observed result happened by comparing competing causes.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps trace runtime bugs, regressions, latency, resource behavior, architecture issues, incidents, and configuration behavior.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish facts from guesses when a bug, performance issue, or system behavior has several plausible explanations.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: agent in frontmatter.

Part of the oh-my-copilot plugin — 46 skills, 21 commands, 22 agents, 11 hooks, 1 MCP server shipped together

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/robinnorberg/oh-my-copilot/trace
Any agent
npx skills add RobinNorberg/oh-my-copilot --skill trace
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/RobinNorberg/oh-my-copilot

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install oh-my-copilot, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 46 skills, 21 commands, 22 agents, 11 hooks, 1 MCP server.

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 trace

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robinnorberg/oh-my-copilot/trace.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/robinnorberg/oh-my-copilot/trace)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/robinnorberg/oh-my-copilot/trace"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/robinnorberg/oh-my-copilot/trace.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 18 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,121 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 98% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00018 $0.02121
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.01060
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00424
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00212

Measured yesterday against content hash 34cfec069978, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

trace 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.

Origin

This is a copy

98% identical to trace — 2 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

skills/trace/SKILL.md · 266 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 266 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Trace Skill

Use this skill for ambiguous, causal, evidence-heavy questions where the goal is to explain why an observed result happened, not to jump directly into fixing or rewriting code.

This is the orchestration layer on top of the built-in tracer agent. The goal is to make tracing feel like a reusable OMC operating lane: restate the observation, generate competing explanations, gather evidence in parallel, rank the explanations, and propose the next probe that would collapse uncertainty fastest.

Good entry cases

Use /oh-my-copilot:trace when the problem is:

  • ambiguous
  • causal
  • evidence-heavy
  • best answered by exploring competing explanations in parallel

Examples:

  • runtime bugs and regressions
  • performance / latency / resource behavior
  • architecture / premortem / postmortem analysis
  • scientific or experimental result tracing
  • config / routing / orchestration behavior explanation
  • “given this output, trace back the likely causes”

Core tracing contract

Always preserve these distinctions:

  1. Observation -- what was actually observed
  2. Hypotheses -- competing explanations
  3. Evidence For -- what supports each explanation
  4. Evidence Against / Gaps -- what contradicts it or is still missing
  5. Current Best Explanation -- the leading explanation right now
  6. Critical Unknown -- the missing fact keeping the top explanations apart
  7. Discriminating Probe -- the highest-value next step to collapse uncertainty

Do not collapse into:

  • a generic fix-it coding loop
  • a generic debugger summary
  • a raw dump of worker output
  • fake certainty when evidence is incomplete

Evidence strength hierarchy

Treat evidence as ranked, not flat.

From strongest to weakest:

  1. Controlled reproductions / direct experiments / uniquely discriminating artifacts
  2. Primary source artifacts with tight provenance (trace events, logs, metrics, benchmark outputs, configs, git history, file:line behavior)
  3. Multiple independent sources converging on the same explanation
  4. Single-source code-path or behavioral inference
  5. Weak circumstantial clues (timing, naming, stack order, resemblance to prior bugs)
  6. Intuition / analogy / speculation

Read the full file on GitHub · 266 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 · 266 lines · 18 tokens per session scan A 34cfec069978

Subscribe to this mod's changes

trace is a skill published in the GitHub repository RobinNorberg/oh-my-copilot (5 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 18 tokens to every session and 2,121 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 98% identical to trace, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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