debugging-strategies

debugging-strategies is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from wshobson/agents. It costs 43 tokens per session (2,935 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 CodeCodex

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

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 · 39,424 stars · on GitHub

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/wshobson/agents/debugging-strategies
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, Codex.

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.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.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" 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 2,935 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 $0.00043 $0.02935
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.01468
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00587
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00294

Measured yesterday against content hash f7361b6e479a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, 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 yesterday.

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

7 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

plugins/developer-essentials/skills/debugging-strategies/SKILL.md · 528 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 528 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 · 528 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. yesterday 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 (39,424 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 2,935 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-03.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

foundry-hosted-agent-validation

Step-by-step process for validating a Python Foundry hosted agent sample (under python/samples/04-hosting/foundry-hosted-agents/) end to end — running it locally (native runtime and azd ai agent run) and after deploying it to an Azure AI Foundry project with azd. Use this when asked to validate a hosted agent sample.

microsoft/agent-framework · 82 tokens

python-feature-lifecycle

Guidance for package and feature lifecycle in the Agent Framework Python codebase, including stage meanings, feature-stage decorators, feature enums, and how to move APIs from one stage to the next.

microsoft/agent-framework · 43 tokens

python-development

Coding standards, conventions, and patterns for developing Python code in the Agent Framework repository. Use this when writing or modifying Python source files in the python/ directory.

microsoft/agent-framework · 35 tokens

artifact-deploy

One-click deploy a user's pre-built app/artifact into their OWN AWS account and get a global public HTTPS link (Vercel-like), with a default TTL and promote-to-persistent. Use when the user says "deploy this", "ship this demo", "give me a public link", "share this externally", or "deploy to AWS".

kirodotdev/KiroCrew · 74 tokens

explain-for

Explain a topic, a piece of code, an error, or a design decision calibrated to one named audience — a 5-year-old, a 5th grader, a manager, a designer, a graduate student, a parent. Resolves who the explanation is for (from the request, or from what memory already records about that person), establishes the ground…

kirodotdev/KiroCrew · 102 tokens

session-summaries

What the chat right-panel session summary shows, what it costs, and how to make a session summarize well. Load when the user asks about the session summary panel, why a summary looks wrong or empty, or how to turn it on.

kirodotdev/KiroCrew · 53 tokens