apd-debug

apd-debug is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from zstevovich/claude-apd. It costs 126 tokens per session (1,513 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A four-phase method for finding the underlying cause of software failures before attempting a fix.

In plain words
What is it for?
Investigating error messages, reproducing failures, examining recent changes, testing explanations, and guiding a verified fix before rerunning a pipeline step.
Why use it?
It prevents repeated guesswork when tests, builds, or applications fail, crash, regress, or behave unexpectedly.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for Claude Code and Codex: shipped in a Claude Code plugin, but also agents/openai.yaml present. Also seen: mentions Codex.

Part of the claude-apd plugin — 11 skills, 5 agents, 8 hooks, 1 MCP server 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/zstevovich/claude-apd/apd-debug
Any agent
npx skills add zstevovich/claude-apd --skill apd-debug
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/zstevovich/claude-apd

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install claude-apd, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 5 agents, 8 hooks, 1 MCP server.

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 apd-debug

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zstevovich/claude-apd/apd-debug.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/zstevovich/claude-apd/apd-debug)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/zstevovich/claude-apd/apd-debug"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/zstevovich/claude-apd/apd-debug.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 126 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,513 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 5.1 $0.00126 $0.01513
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.00757
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00303
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00151

Measured 5d ago against content hash 02ca66347f2b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

apd-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 5d 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/apd/skills/apd-debug/SKILL.md · 124 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 124 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

APD Systematic Debugging (Codex)

Do this BEFORE re-running any pipeline phase.

When to use / When to skip

Use when:

  • A test failed (unit, integration, or end-to-end)
  • A build or compile failed
  • The verifier step blocked the pipeline
  • The reviewer raised a critical finding
  • You are about to re-run a pipeline phase after a verifier failure (MANDATORY)

Skip when:

  • The "failure" is actually expected behaviour (test marked skip/expected-fail)
  • You haven't run the failing command yourself yet (run it first, get a real error message)
  • The issue is a known intermittent and you have a tracking ticket — escalate, don't loop

The Iron Law

NO FIXES WITHOUT ROOT CAUSE INVESTIGATION FIRST

Guessing is not debugging. If you have not completed Phase 1, you cannot propose a fix.

Four phases

Phase 1 — root cause investigation

  1. Read the error fully. Don't skip the stack trace. Note file:line references, exception types, and the exact command that produced it.
  2. Reproduce reliably. Can you trigger the failure consistently? If not, find a repro first — intermittent fixes are almost never fixes.
  3. Check recent changes. git diff, recent commits on this pipeline.
  4. Trace the data flow. Where does the bad value originate? What transformation produced it?

Phase 2 — pattern analysis

  1. Find working examples of similar code in this codebase.
  2. Compare systematically — what is different between the working path and the broken path?
  3. List every difference. Don't skip with "that can't matter" — the subtle ones are usually the answer.

Phase 3 — hypothesis and controlled test

  1. State the hypothesis as a sentence. "I think X causes Y because Z."
  2. Test with the smallest possible change. One variable at a time.
  3. Verify. Did it resolve the failure? If not, form a NEW hypothesis — don't layer fixes.
  4. 3+ failed hypotheses → STOP and escalate to the user with a clear summary of what you tried and what you learned.

Read the full file on GitHub · 124 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files 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. 5d ago First seen · 124 lines · 126 tokens per session scan A 02ca66347f2b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

apd-debug is a skill published in the GitHub repository zstevovich/claude-apd (5 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 126 tokens to every session and 1,513 once invoked, about $0.0006 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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