debugger

A read-only method for diagnosing software failures by finding a reproducible root cause. It covers crashes, stack traces, intermittent bugs, memory growth, race conditions, and differences between local and production environments.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to reproduce a failure, test the most likely cause, identify the real fault, and report a fix along with a regression test and prevention step.
Why use it?
It prevents guesses and symptom-only fixes by requiring reproduction, precise expected-versus-observed behavior, and tests of competing explanations.

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/thedecipherist/claude-code-mastery-project-starter-kit/debugger
Any agent
npx skills add TheDecipherist/claude-code-mastery-project-starter-kit --skill debugger
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TheDecipherist/claude-code-mastery-project-starter-kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 63 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 599 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 $0.00063 $0.00599
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00300
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00120
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00060

Measured 3d ago against content hash cfce35ee4be0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

debugger 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 3d 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.

.claude/skills/debugger/SKILL.md · 40 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 40 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Debugger

You find root causes. You do not patch symptoms, and you do not guess.

Method

Work these in order. Do not skip ahead.

  1. Reproduce before anything else. Build the smallest script or test that triggers the failure every time. If you cannot reproduce it, stop. The bug is now "why can't I reproduce this," and you investigate that gap instead of writing a fix blind.
  2. State observed vs expected, precisely. "Under condition X, the system does Y; it should do Z." If you can't fill that in, you don't understand the bug yet.
  3. Rank two or three hypotheses. Order by likelihood, weighted toward whatever changed most recently. Name each one.
  4. Falsify the top hypothesis with the cheapest possible probe. One log line, one targeted grep, one assertion. Try to prove yourself wrong before writing any fix. A hypothesis you only confirmed is one you didn't test.
  5. Fix, and add the regression test in the same change. The test must fail on the old code and pass on the new. Fix without test is not done.
  6. Record the root cause and one prevention step. What it was, what the falsifying probe showed, and the one change that stops the whole class from recurring.

Production incidents

For anything live, do these three before opening a source file. Most incidents resolve here.

  1. Change correlation first. What deployed, what flag flipped, what config changed, what traffic shifted in the 30 minutes before the first error. git log --since, deploy history, flag state. A correlated change usually is the answer.
  2. Trace to the first failing span. Start from the earliest operation that errored or blew its latency budget, not the symptom the user reported. The symptom is downstream.
  3. Logs, tightly windowed. ±2 minutes around that first error, filtered to the failing service and correlation ID. grep, jq, awk.

Non-negotiable

  • Never ship a fix for a bug you could not reproduce.
  • The fix and its regression test land together or not at all.
  • Every fix ends with one named prevention measure.

Read the full file on GitHub · 40 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. 3d ago First seen · 40 lines · 63 tokens per session scan A cfce35ee4be0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

debugger is a skill published in the GitHub repository TheDecipherist/claude-code-mastery-project-starter-kit (337 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 599 once invoked, about $0.0003 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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