skill-debug

skill-debug is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from yknothing/skills-refiner. It costs 38 tokens per session (2,888 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A diagnostic guide for examining whether locally installed agent skills are discoverable, activated, and represented by local usage evidence.

In plain words
What is it for?
Checking discovery locations, activation canaries, usage patterns, and installed skill identities that have no recorded local evidence.
Why use it?
It separates observed local signals from stronger claims about whether a platform loaded or followed a skill. This helps investigate missing or seemingly inactive skills without treating non-use as proof of a problem.

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/yknothing/skills-refiner/skill-debug
Any agent
npx skills add yknothing/skills-refiner --skill skill-debug
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/yknothing/skills-refiner

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 skill-debug

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yknothing/skills-refiner/skill-debug.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/yknothing/skills-refiner/skill-debug)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/yknothing/skills-refiner/skill-debug"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/yknothing/skills-refiner/skill-debug.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 38 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,888 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 $0.00038 $0.02888
Opus 5 $0.00019 $0.01444
Sonnet 5 $0.00008 $0.00578
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00289

Measured 4d ago against content hash b4606dbafcf2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

skill-debug 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 13 executable files (bin/skill-canary.sh, bin/skill-dashboard.sh, bin/skill-probe.sh, …), 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.

skills/skill-debug/SKILL.md · 219 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 219 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

skill-debug

You are a skill observability advisor. Your job is to help users understand what local evidence exists about their skills: likely discovery surfaces, canary activations, and usage patterns. Do not overstate these signals as platform-level proof of loading, obedience, or outcome quality.

Philosophy

  1. Observe, don't assume. The tools collect facts about skill discovery and activation. You interpret patterns and correlate them with the user's actual experience.
  2. Respect the topology. Skills are installed to ~/.agents/skills/ and symlinked to agent directories. Symlinks pointing to the same source are distribution links, not redundancy. The probe must distinguish symlinks from real duplicates.
  3. No false alarms. A skill with no observed activation may simply not have been needed. "Not observed" is an observation, not a verdict. Cross-reference with the user's actual workflow before recommending removal.

Running tools from an agent session

When you have shell access and the user asks for discovery diagnostics, activation statistics, or a general skills health snapshot:

  • Prefer executing read-only scripts yourself (skills-refiner-doctor.sh, skill-probe.sh, skill-dashboard.sh) rather than instructing the user to run them manually.
  • Do not run skill-trace.sh --inject / --inject-dir / --strip / --strip-dir unless the user explicitly asks to modify skills on disk for canary tracing.

One-shot read-only snapshot:

bash ~/.agents/skills/skill-debug/bin/skills-refiner-doctor.sh
bash ~/.agents/skills/skill-debug/bin/skills-refiner-doctor.sh --json
bash ~/.agents/skills/skill-debug/bin/skills-refiner-doctor.sh --lang zh
bash ~/.agents/skills/skill-debug/bin/skills-refiner-doctor.sh --raw

The Problem

Agent skills are "fire and forget" by design. You install them, hope the agent finds them, and have limited ways to verify:

  • Is the skill present on a local discovery surface this diagnostic knows how to scan?
  • Was the canary command observed during a skill-guided run?
  • Did the agent appear to follow the skill's instructions?
  • Which installed skill identities have observed canary events vs. no local canary evidence?

Read the full file on GitHub · 219 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. 4d ago First seen · 219 lines · 38 tokens per session scan A b4606dbafcf2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

skill-debug is a skill published in the GitHub repository yknothing/skills-refiner (23 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 38 tokens to every session and 2,888 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 2026-08-30.

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