debug-mcp-agent

debug-mcp-agent is a skill for Claude Code from sailingnaturali/claude-skills. It costs 70 tokens per session (613 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A troubleshooting guide for AI agents that use MCP servers, which connect agents to outside tools and data sources.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check the original data source, verify the configured model, investigate errors such as 404s and unreachable servers, and find leaked internal output.
Why use it?
It helps separate missing data from broken connections, wrong tool requests, or problems in the agent itself.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the debug-mcp-agent plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it to check the original data source, verify the configured model, investigate errors such as 404s and unreachable servers, and find leaked internal output.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/sailingnaturali/claude-skills/debug-mcp-agent
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 sailingnaturali/claude-skills --skill debug-mcp-agent
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/sailingnaturali/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install debug-mcp-agent, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

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 debug-mcp-agent

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sailingnaturali/claude-skills/debug-mcp-agent/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/sailingnaturali/claude-skills/debug-mcp-agent)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sailingnaturali/claude-skills/debug-mcp-agent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sailingnaturali/claude-skills/debug-mcp-agent/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 debug-mcp-agent

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sailingnaturali/claude-skills/debug-mcp-agent"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sailingnaturali/claude-skills/debug-mcp-agent.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 613 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. 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 $0.00070 $0.00613
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.00307
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00123
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00061

Measured 10d ago against content hash e0e323da95fc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

debug-mcp-agent scanned grade A with 1 finding 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.

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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

Hit the underlying API / DB / tool yourself (curl, the CLI, a direct query) for the exact
debug-mcp-agent/skills/debug-mcp-agent/SKILL.md · 48 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 48 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Debug an MCP / tool-backed agent

The agent's own narration of what went wrong is often the bug. Probe ground truth directly, out of band, before trusting anything the agent said.

1. Ground truth — query the source directly, bypass the agent

Hit the underlying API / DB / tool yourself (curl, the CLI, a direct query) for the exact thing the agent claimed was missing.

  • Data is there → the failure is in the MCP/tool/agent layer, not the source.
  • Genuinely absent (404 / empty) → that's "not available," not an error. Agents and MCP clients routinely conflate the two; a burst of 404s can even trip a client's circuit breaker and swallow valid reads afterward.
  • Connection refused / unreachable → the source or the MCP process is down — not a missing field. Confirm the process/container is up; restart it.

2. Which model is driving?

Confirm the configured model is the one you expect. A weaker or local model silently swapped in is a common root cause of: leaked chain-of-thought, leaked control tokens, skipped tool calls, replies truncated mid-sentence, and confident confabulation about things it can't see.

3. The tool / MCP layer

  • "MCP server X unreachable after N attempts" = the MCP process or its backing service died mid-conversation — not a missing path. Different fix than "data absent."
  • Wrong path / argument guessed (e.g. sensors.depth vs the real environment.depth.belowTransducer): the agent is inventing the schema. Ground the real shape in the prompt, or give it a list/describe tool so it stops guessing identifiers.
  • Auth, not absence: a 401/403 on a write or a privileged/admin route is a permissions problem, not missing data — check the token's scope, not the data.

4. Plausible-but-wrong values

If the numbers look reasonable but are wrong, suspect a mock / fixture / sandbox data source rather than a logic bug — confirm which environment the agent is actually pointed at.

Close out

Read the full file on GitHub · 48 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. 10d ago First seen · 48 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A e0e323da95fc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

debug-mcp-agent is a skill published in the GitHub repository sailingnaturali/claude-skills (2 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 613 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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