rc-diagnose

rc-diagnose is a skill for Claude Code from rodolfochicone/rc-project. It costs 37 tokens per session (1,848 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A bug-diagnosis skill that finds the underlying cause of a failure, then fixes and verifies it when a change is needed. Root cause means the reason the problem occurs, not just its visible symptom.

In plain words
What is it for?
Investigating failures, reproducing behavior, identifying the root cause, applying a fix, and checking the result.
Why use it?
It prevents temporary workarounds that leave the original problem in place and requires evidence that the fix works.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: effort in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter; mentions subagents.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the rc plugin — 32 skills, 2 commands, 4 agents, 5 hooks shipped together

Good fit Investigating failures, reproducing behavior, identifying the root cause, applying a fix, and checking the result.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add rodolfochicone/rc-project
Claude Code
/plugin install rc

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install rc, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 32 skills, 2 commands, 4 agents, 5 hooks.

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 rc-diagnose

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rodolfochicone/rc-project/rc-diagnose/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rodolfochicone/rc-project/rc-diagnose)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rodolfochicone/rc-project/rc-diagnose"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rodolfochicone/rc-project/rc-diagnose/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 rc-diagnose

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rodolfochicone/rc-project/rc-diagnose"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rodolfochicone/rc-project/rc-diagnose.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 37 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,848 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 $0.00037 $0.01848
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00924
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00370
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00185

Measured 10d ago against content hash df9df7b33f48, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

rc-diagnose 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 10d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 2 executable files (references/condition-based-waiting-example.ts, references/find-polluter.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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/promoted/rc-diagnose/SKILL.md · 152 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 152 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Diagnose

Find out why something behaves the way it does, then — when a change is implied — fix the cause and verify it. Investigation and remediation are one method, not two skills: splitting them meant writing a plan to disk so the other half could read it back, and a plan that survives a handoff is a plan that went stale.

Read $CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT/skills/promoted/rc/references/conventions.md first — it holds Serena navigation, the .rc resolution, the root-cause-over-workaround rule, the verification-evidence bar, and the project-memory contract.

The iron law

NO FIX WITHOUT ROOT CAUSE FIRST

A symptom fix is a failure, not a shortcut. This holds especially under time pressure, when the fix looks obvious, and when you have already tried one — those are the conditions that make guessing tempting, and guessing is what turns 20 minutes into an afternoon.

1 — Frame and reproduce

Restate the prompt as the concrete question(s) the work must answer. If it could be read several materially different ways, ask one focused question; otherwise state your interpretation and proceed.

Read the error completely — the full stack trace, line numbers, error codes. It often contains the answer. Then reproduce: can you trigger it reliably, with what exact steps, every time? Not reproducible means gather more data, never guess. Check what recently changed — git diff, recent commits, new dependencies, config, environment differences.

2 — Investigate

Locate the entry points and symbols, then map the slice: callers, callees, interfaces, data structures, and the flow of control and data through them. Trace behavior end to end; never read one file in isolation. Delegate broad recon on unfamiliar areas to parallel read-only subagents, then read the pivotal files yourself in full before concluding.

Ground every claim in a file:line. Read the code that proves a claim — a name is not evidence, a function may not do what it is called. Separate established fact (backed by a reference) from inference (your reasoning) and label which is which.

Read the full file on GitHub · 152 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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. 10d ago First seen · 152 lines · 37 tokens per session scan A df9df7b33f48

Subscribe to this mod's changes

rc-diagnose is a skill published in the GitHub repository rodolfochicone/rc-project (19 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 37 tokens to every session and 1,848 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-08-30.

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