hw-debug-loop

hw-debug-loop is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from vibeic/vibe-ic. It costs 191 tokens per session (2,981 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A method for finding hardware bugs that appear on a real chip or FPGA after simulation and structural checks have passed. It focuses on half-duplex protocols, where devices take turns sending and receiving.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it after the hardware has been programmed and the host-side acceptance test fails even though the bus-functional model and earlier checks pass.
Why use it?
It narrows down failures that only occur in the real hardware test, reducing repeated trial and error.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the vibe-ic plugin — 41 skills, 7 commands, 8 agents, 2 hooks, 1 MCP server shipped together

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/vibeic/vibe-ic/hw-debug-loop
Any agent
npx skills add vibeic/vibe-ic --skill hw-debug-loop
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vibeic/vibe-ic

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install vibe-ic, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 41 skills, 7 commands, 8 agents, 2 hooks, 1 MCP server.

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 hw-debug-loop

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vibeic/vibe-ic/hw-debug-loop.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vibeic/vibe-ic/hw-debug-loop)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vibeic/vibe-ic/hw-debug-loop"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vibeic/vibe-ic/hw-debug-loop.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 191 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,981 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 $0.00191 $0.02981
Opus 5 $0.00096 $0.01491
Sonnet 5 $0.00038 $0.00596
Haiku 4.5 $0.00019 $0.00298

Measured 4d ago against content hash ba20bfaa9df8, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

hw-debug-loop 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (tests/test_compliance.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

vibe-ic-marketplace/plugins/vibe-ic/skills/hw-debug-loop/SKILL.md · 268 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 268 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Case-study notation. This skill cites the / / MDV-A1101 reference project as concrete evidence for the rules below. The rules themselves are chip-AGNOSTIC and apply to any IC of the matching ic_class (see vibe-ic-marketplace/plugins/vibe-ic/programs/ic_class_profile.py). When you adopt this skill on a different IC, swap <chip-class><your IC name> and <half-duplex-tester><your host-tester name>; the structural gates and rule bodies do not depend on those SKUs. See docs/design/CASE_STUDIES/AS3616_*.md for the full regression history.

Closed Hardware Debug Loop

Phase 2c, post-burn: the plugin's structural gates have all PASSed, the project's BFM is 12/12 byte-exact, the SOF is burned, but the host acceptance test (the project's <host_tester> verdict — e.g. byte[6] on a half-duplex protocol IC, or the equivalent rig verdict for the target IC class) FAILs. This skill is the methodology that drives the fix without an indefinite trial-and-error loop.

Why This Skill Exists

After v0.119.5–v0.119.11 the plugin captures Categories A and most of C. Two classes of failure remain:

  • Category B — vendor doc disagrees with silicon (e.g. v099 oracle returns 18 bytes for 0xE6 but the doc says 22). Plugin extractor cannot detect this from L1-L27 alone; the only ground truth is silicon.

  • Category C residual — sub-microsecond pad / FPGA-pad-inference details that surface only when a particular agent's RTL pattern interacts with a particular silicon's analog front-end. Each new instance becomes a new structural gate (LL-15/16/17/23 are these), but the next one is unknown until it appears.

The closed debug loop converts an indefinite "try-and-error until it works" into a bounded sequence of named experiments, each producing a named evidence file, each leading to a deterministic next step.

When to Use

Read the full file on GitHub · 268 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 4d ago First seen · 268 lines · 191 tokens per session scan A ba20bfaa9df8

Subscribe to this mod's changes

hw-debug-loop is a skill published in the GitHub repository vibeic/vibe-ic (21 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 191 tokens to every session and 2,981 once invoked, about $0.0010 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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