systematic-debugging

A step-by-step debugging workflow for bugs, failing tests, broken integrations, and unexpected behavior.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to capture failures, reproduce them, inspect recent changes, test one hypothesis, and identify the root cause before fixing.
Why use it?
It replaces guesswork with evidence by requiring a reproducible failure, log review, and tracing back to the original bad state.

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/threat-vector-security/guardian-agent/systematic-debugging
Any agent
npx skills add Threat-Vector-Security/guardian-agent --skill systematic-debugging
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Threat-Vector-Security/guardian-agent

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 711 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 $0.00025 $0.00711
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00356
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00142
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00071

Measured 2d ago against content hash 491cf0a4b16d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

systematic-debugging 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 2d 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.

skills/systematic-debugging/SKILL.md · 67 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 67 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Systematic Debugging

Overview / When to Use

Do not guess. Find the root cause before changing code, config, or prompts. No fixes without investigation first. If you have not reproduced the issue, read the errors, and traced where the bad state comes from, you are not ready to fix it.

Process

  1. Capture the exact failure.
    • Record the command, request, or user action that fails.
    • Read the full error output, stack trace, and relevant logs.
    • If the issue is intermittent, collect enough evidence to describe the pattern.
  2. Reproduce the issue consistently.
    • Prefer the narrowest reliable reproduction.
    • If you cannot reproduce it, gather more evidence instead of guessing.
  3. Check recent changes and working examples.
    • Look at the diff, config changes, dependency changes, and comparable working code paths.
  4. Trace backward to the source of the bad value or state.
    • Start where the failure appears.
    • Keep moving backward until you find where the wrong input, assumption, or transition originated.
  5. Form one hypothesis and test it with the smallest useful change.
    • Change one thing at a time.
    • If the hypothesis fails, return to investigation with the new evidence.
  6. Add a regression test or equivalent reproducible check before the permanent fix.
  7. Verify the fix with the original reproduction and the regression test.

Common Rationalizations

Rationalization Reality
"I know what this is, I'll just fix it." Guessing leads to incomplete fixes or new bugs. Reproduce and trace it first.
"I'll try fixing three things at once to save time." Multiple changes obscure which one actually fixed the issue or introduced regressions. Change one thing at a time.
"I'll skip the regression test since I manually verified it." If it broke once, it will break again. Add a reproducible check before calling it done.

Red Flags

Stop and return to investigation if you catch yourself:

  • proposing multiple fixes at once
  • saying "it is probably X"
  • patching symptoms without tracing source state
  • skipping a failing test because manual verification seems faster
  • trying a fourth fix after three failed attempts (this means the architecture or assumption is wrong)

Read the full file on GitHub · 67 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 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. 2d ago First seen · 67 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A 491cf0a4b16d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

systematic-debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository Threat-Vector-Security/guardian-agent (11 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 711 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.

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