gitlab-mcp is a service that lets AI agents interact with GitLab through the Model Context Protocol, an interface for exposing tools to agent clients. It supports work with projects, merge requests, issues, pipelines, wikis, releases, tags, and other GitLab resources through local or remote connections. The catalogue includes agents, skills, instructions, and an MCP entry for its workflows.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to zereight/gitlab-mcp. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zereight/gitlab-mcp/main/.github/skills/trace/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zereight/gitlab-mcpWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zereight/gitlab-mcp/trace)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zereight/gitlab-mcp/trace"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zereight/gitlab-mcp/trace/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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zereight/gitlab-mcp/trace"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zereight/gitlab-mcp/trace.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00033 | $0.00350 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00013 | $0.00140 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00007 | $0.00070 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00003 | $0.00035 |
Grade A, and why
trace 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 1mo 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.
What it actually says
Trace
Evidence-driven causal tracing using competing hypotheses. Use for ambiguous, causal, evidence-heavy questions where the goal is to explain WHY something happened.
Good Entry Cases
- Runtime bugs and regressions
- Performance / latency behavior
- Architecture / premortem / postmortem analysis
- Config / routing / orchestration behavior
- "Given this output, trace back the likely causes"
Core Contract
Always preserve: Observation → Hypotheses → Evidence For → Evidence Against → Best Explanation → Critical Unknown → Discriminating Probe
Workflow
- Restate the observed result precisely
- Generate 3 deliberately different hypotheses:
- Code-path / implementation cause
- Config / environment / orchestration cause
- Measurement / artifact / assumption mismatch
- Assign @tracer to each hypothesis lane
- Each lane: evidence for, evidence against, critical unknown, discriminating probe
- Apply lenses: Systems, Premortem, Science
- Rebuttal round between top two hypotheses
- Rank, detect convergence, synthesize
Output
### Observed Result
[What happened]
### Ranked Hypotheses
| Rank | Hypothesis | Confidence | Evidence Strength |
|------|------------|------------|-------------------|
### Most Likely Explanation
[Current best explanation]
### Critical Unknown
[Single missing fact]
### Recommended Discriminating Probe
[Single next probe]
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 54 lines · 33 tokens per session scan A fb21957a1ad7
trace is a skill published in the GitHub repository zereight/gitlab-mcp (2,047 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 33 tokens to every session and 350 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-08-30.
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