adversarial-debugging

A debugging method that uses several agents to investigate competing explanations for a difficult software problem and challenge one another's findings.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to run parallel root-cause investigations, compare evidence and counterarguments, and narrow down the most likely explanation.
Why use it?
It helps when a bug has several plausible causes, happens intermittently, or has resisted a single investigator's attempts to explain it.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the adversarial-debugger plugin — 1 skill, 3 agents 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/xrensiu/claude-code-forge/adversarial-debugging
Any agent
npx skills add XRenSiu/claude-code-forge --skill adversarial-debugging
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/XRenSiu/claude-code-forge

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install adversarial-debugger, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 3 agents.

Per session 102 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,534 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 $0.00102 $0.03534
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.01767
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00707
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00353

Measured 2d ago against content hash a85f5c5e7f4e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

adversarial-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.

plugins/adversarial-debugger/skills/adversarial-debugging/SKILL.md · 422 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 422 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Adversarial Debugging

用多个 agent 的对抗辩论替代单 agent 的线性推理。

实测数据:复杂 bug 中单 agent 首次假设正确率约 40%。对抗式调试通过并行调查 + 相互挑战,将根因定位准确率提升到 80%+。

Announce at start: "I'm using the adversarial-debugging skill to create an agent team that investigates competing hypotheses in parallel."

前置条件: 需要启用 Agent Teams 实验性功能。 在 settings.json 中添加: "env": { "CLAUDE_CODE_EXPERIMENTAL_AGENT_TEAMS": "1" }

When to Use

digraph {
    rankdir=TB;
    start [label="遇到 Bug" shape=oval];
    q1 [label="原因明显?" shape=diamond];
    q2 [label="单 agent\n能定位?" shape=diamond];
    q3 [label="多个可能\n根因?" shape=diamond];
    systematic [label="systematic-debugging" shape=box];
    adversarial [label="adversarial-debugging\n(本 Skill)" shape=box style=filled fillcolor=lightgreen];
    direct [label="直接修复" shape=box];

    start -> q1;
    q1 -> direct [label="是"];
    q1 -> q2 [label="否"];
    q2 -> systematic [label="可能"];
    q2 -> adversarial [label="困难"];
    q3 -> adversarial [label="是"];
    systematic -> q3 [label="失败后"];
}

vs. systematic-debugging

维度 systematic-debugging adversarial-debugging
Agent 数量 1 个 (顺序) 3-7 个 (并行)
假设处理 逐一测试 并行调查 + 辩论
偏见防御 流程纪律 结构化对抗
适合场景 常规 bug 复杂/间歇性 bug
Token 消耗 高 (多 agent)
速度 中等 快 (并行)
准确率 更高 (多视角)

The 5-Phase Protocol

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                   ADVERSARIAL DEBUGGING                         │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                                 │
│  Phase 0: INTAKE            收集完整问题信息                      │
│           ↓                                                     │
│                                                                 │
│  Phase 1: HYPOTHESIZE       生成 3-5 个竞争假设                  │
│           ↓                 每个假设必须可证伪、独立              │
│                                                                 │
│  Phase 2: TEAM ASSEMBLY     创建 Agent Team                     │
│           ↓                 为每个假设分配调查员                  │
│                             + Devil's Advocate + Synthesizer    │
│                                                                 │
│  Phase 3: DEBATE            2-3 轮对抗辩论                       │
│           ↓                 调查 → 挑战 → 回应 → 综合            │
│                                                                 │
│  Phase 4: VERDICT & FIX     共识判定 + TDD 修复                  │
│                                                                 │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Read the full file on GitHub · 422 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. 2d ago First seen · 422 lines · 102 tokens per session scan A a85f5c5e7f4e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

adversarial-debugging is a skill published in the GitHub repository XRenSiu/claude-code-forge (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 102 tokens to every session and 3,534 once invoked, about $0.0005 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 2026-08-31.

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