bisect

A Git workflow for finding the first commit that introduced a failure. Git bisect narrows the search by testing commits between a known working version and a failing version.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it with a test command that identifies success or failure. It checks the working tree, verifies the current failure, searches backward for a passing commit, and identifies the first bad one.
Why use it?
It reduces the number of historical commits that need manual inspection when a test currently fails.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/ryanb/dotfiles/bisect
Any agent
npx skills add ryanb/dotfiles --skill bisect
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ryanb/dotfiles

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 18 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 614 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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 $0.00018 $0.00614
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00307
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00123
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00061

Measured yesterday against content hash 294f7646c92e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

bisect 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.

claude/skills/bisect/SKILL.md · 78 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 78 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

bisect — Find the First Bad Commit

Use git bisect to binary-search through commit history and find the first commit that introduced a failure.

Step 1: Ensure clean working tree

Check that there are no staged or unstaged changes. If there are, stop and tell the user they need a clean working tree before bisecting, since git bisect checks out older commits.

git status --porcelain

If the output is non-empty, stop and ask the user to commit or stash their changes first.

Step 2: Determine the test command

Use $ARGUMENTS to understand what the user wants to test. This should describe a command or check that fails on the current commit. Determine the exact shell command to run.

Step 3: Verify the current commit is bad

Run the test command on the current commit (HEAD). If it passes (exits 0), stop and tell the user — the current commit doesn't exhibit the failure, so there's nothing to bisect.

Step 4: Find a good commit

Start searching backwards from HEAD in steps of 10 commits to find a commit where the test passes.

git stash --include-untracked -q 2>/dev/null; true
git checkout HEAD~10 --quiet

Run the test command. If it still fails, go back another 10 commits (HEAD~10 from the current position). Repeat until either:

  • A passing commit is found, or
  • You've gone back 100+ commits without finding a passing one — stop and ask the user for guidance (maybe a known-good commit SHA).

Once a good commit is found, note its SHA.

Step 5: Run git bisect

Return to the original branch first, then start bisecting:

git checkout - --quiet
git bisect start
git bisect bad
git bisect good <good-commit-sha>

Git will check out a middle commit. Run the test command on it:

  • If the test failsgit bisect bad
  • If the test passesgit bisect good

Repeat until git reports the first bad commit.

Step 6: Record the result and clean up

Save the first bad commit SHA and message. Then reset:

git bisect reset

Read the full file on GitHub · 78 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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 · 78 lines · 18 tokens per session scan A 294f7646c92e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

bisect is a skill published in the GitHub repository ryanb/dotfiles (2,399 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 18 tokens to every session and 614 once invoked, about $0.0001 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

next-cache-components-adoption

Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…

vercel/next.js · 95 tokens

babysit-pr

Babysit a GitHub pull request after creation by continuously polling review comments, CI checks/workflow runs, and mergeability state until the PR is merged/closed or user help is required. Diagnose failures, retry likely flaky failures up to 3 times, auto-fix/push branch-related issues when appropriate, and keep…

openai/codex · 114 tokens

imagegen

Generate or edit raster images when the task benefits from AI-created bitmap visuals such as photos, illustrations, textures, sprites, mockups, or transparent-background cutouts. Use when Codex should create a brand-new image, transform an existing image, or derive visual variants from references, and the output…

openai/codex · 113 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens

next-cache-components-optimizer

Drive a Next.js route to instant navigation by setting up an agentic loop, under Cache Components / PPR, on initial load (hard navigation) and client-side navigation (soft navigation). Encode the goal as a failing @next/playwright instant() e2e and work it to green, one verified route at a time; the shipped test then…

vercel/next.js · 170 tokens