Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to Sma1lboy/rove. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Sma1lboy/rove/main/.agents/skills/pstack/skills/principle-fix-root-causes/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Sma1lboy/roveWrote 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/sma1lboy/rove/principle-fix-root-causes)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sma1lboy/rove/principle-fix-root-causes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sma1lboy/rove/principle-fix-root-causes/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/sma1lboy/rove/principle-fix-root-causes"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/sma1lboy/rove/principle-fix-root-causes.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" 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 | $0.00042 | $0.00299 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00021 | $0.00150 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00008 | $0.00060 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00030 |
Grade A, and why
principle-fix-root-causes 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.
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.
This is a copy
94% identical to principle-fix-root-causes — 4 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.
What it actually says
Fix Root Causes
When debugging, do not paper over symptoms. Trace every problem to its root cause and fix it there.
Why: Symptom fixes accumulate. Each workaround makes the system harder to reason about, and the real bug remains. Root-cause fixes are slower upfront but reduce total debugging time.
Pattern:
- Reproduce first (if you can't reproduce it, you can't verify your fix)
- Ask "why" until you hit the root cause
- Resist the urge to add guards (adding a nil check to silence a crash is a symptom fix)
- If a workaround needs a paragraph-long comment to justify it, the code is wrong (fix the code, not the comment)
- Check for the pattern, not just the instance (grep for the same pattern, fix all instances)
- When stuck, instrument. Don't guess (add logging, read the actual error)
Restart bugs: suspect state before code
Code doesn't change between runs. State does. When something "fails after restart," suspect stale persistent state first: config files, caches, lock files, serialized state. If clearing a state file restores behavior, prioritize state validation as the fix.
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.
- 10d ago First seen · 26 lines · 42 tokens per session scan A a29d767cb2ee
principle-fix-root-causes is a skill published in the GitHub repository Sma1lboy/rove (122 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 42 tokens to every session and 299 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 94% identical to principle-fix-root-causes, differing in 4 lines, and is treated as a copy.
Other skills, from other repositories
fable-recover
Diagnose repeated command failures, stale build caches, branch drift, or contradictory evidence before attempting further code edits. Use when commands fail repeatedly, tests stay red after attempted fixes, build output contradicts source code, or the execution path is confused — even if the user does not explicitly…
debug
Use when diagnosing software errors, test failures, or unexpected runtime behavior.
learner
Post-debugging knowledge extraction — captures non-obvious, codebase-specific learnings that pass quality gates. Invoke after resolving tricky bugs or discovering surprising behavior.
error-tracing
Read stack traces, follow error chains, and trace errors to their root cause. Use when the user encounters an error message, stack trace, exception, or crash. Apply when debugging async errors, React error boundaries, source map issues, or when an error message is unclear.
log-analysis
Implement structured logging and analyze logs to diagnose issues. Use when the user sets up logging, asks about log levels, needs to trace requests through distributed systems, or is analyzing log output to debug a problem. Apply when adding logging to any application.
systematic-debugging
Apply structured debugging techniques to find and fix bugs efficiently. Use when the user reports a bug, encounters unexpected behavior, says something is "not working", or asks for help debugging. Apply hypothesis-driven debugging instead of random changes.