debugging-strategies

debugging-strategies is a skill for Claude Code from wshobson/agents. It costs 43 tokens per session (1,498 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A practical guide to finding the causes of bugs, slow code, crashes, and unexpected behaviour. It uses repeatable investigation steps such as reproducing, isolating, testing theories, and checking evidence.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate bugs, performance problems, memory leaks, crash reports, stack traces, and distributed-system issues.
Why use it?
It replaces guesswork with a structured way to investigate problems, including issues in unfamiliar or production code.

Skill for Claude Code

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

Part of the developer-essentials plugin — 11 skills, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it to investigate bugs, performance problems, memory leaks, crash reports, stack traces, and distributed-system issues.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/wshobson/agents/debugging-strategies
About the project

Agentic Plugin Marketplace is a collection of reusable plugins, agents, skills, commands, and rules for coding-agent tools including Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, OpenCode, Antigravity CLI, and GitHub Copilot. It is for developers assembling agentic workflows across multiple harnesses from shared Markdown sources, and the catalogue entries are examples or subsets of those workflow components.

wshobson/agents · 41,158 stars · on GitHub · sethhobson.com

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 wshobson/agents --skill debugging-strategies
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/wshobson/agents

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install developer-essentials, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 1 agent.

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 debugging-strategies

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wshobson/agents/debugging-strategies/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/wshobson/agents/debugging-strategies)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wshobson/agents/debugging-strategies"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wshobson/agents/debugging-strategies/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 debugging-strategies

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/wshobson/agents/debugging-strategies"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/wshobson/agents/debugging-strategies.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,498 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 15 Sept 2026
  • Snyk pass 15 Sept 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 $0.00043 $0.01498
Opus 5.5 $0.00017 $0.00599
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00009 $0.00300
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00150

Measured 4d ago against content hash 1c8a71ccf478, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

debugging-strategies 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.

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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

plugins/developer-essentials/skills/debugging-strategies/SKILL.md · 266 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 266 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Debugging Strategies

Transform debugging from frustrating guesswork into systematic problem-solving with proven strategies, powerful tools, and methodical approaches.

When to Use This Skill

  • Tracking down elusive bugs
  • Investigating performance issues
  • Understanding unfamiliar codebases
  • Debugging production issues
  • Analyzing crash dumps and stack traces
  • Profiling application performance
  • Investigating memory leaks
  • Debugging distributed systems

Core Principles

1. The Scientific Method

1. Observe: What's the actual behavior? 2. Hypothesize: What could be causing it? 3. Experiment: Test your hypothesis 4. Analyze: Did it prove/disprove your theory? 5. Repeat: Until you find the root cause

2. Debugging Mindset

Don't Assume:

  • "It can't be X" - Yes it can
  • "I didn't change Y" - Check anyway
  • "It works on my machine" - Find out why

Do:

  • Reproduce consistently
  • Isolate the problem
  • Keep detailed notes
  • Question everything
  • Take breaks when stuck

3. Rubber Duck Debugging

Explain your code and problem out loud (to a rubber duck, colleague, or yourself). Often reveals the issue.

Systematic Debugging Process

Phase 1: Reproduce

## Reproduction Checklist

1. **Can you reproduce it?**
   - Always? Sometimes? Randomly?
   - Specific conditions needed?
   - Can others reproduce it?

2. **Create minimal reproduction**
   - Simplify to smallest example
   - Remove unrelated code
   - Isolate the problem

3. **Document steps**
   - Write down exact steps
   - Note environment details
   - Capture error messages

Phase 2: Gather Information

## Information Collection

1. **Error Messages**
   - Full stack trace
   - Error codes
   - Console/log output

2. **Environment**
   - OS version
   - Language/runtime version
   - Dependencies versions
   - Environment variables

3. **Recent Changes**
   - Git history
   - Deployment timeline
   - Configuration changes

4. **Scope**
   - Affects all users or specific ones?
   - All browsers or specific ones?
   - Production only or also dev?

Read the full file on GitHub · 266 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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 Changed · -262 lines 1c8a71ccf478
  2. 1mo ago First seen · 528 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A f7361b6e479a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

debugging-strategies is a skill published in the GitHub repository wshobson/agents (41,158 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 1,498 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-03.

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