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Systematic debugging

Skill andresnator/agents-orchestrator/skills/systematic-debugging

Install
npx -y skills add andresnator/agents-orchestrator --skill systematic-debugging

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One thing to look at

  • 0 stars0 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Trigger: debug, debugging, root cause, root-cause analysis, why does this fail, intermittent failure, shotgun fixes. Root-cause debugging loop: reproduce, gather evidence, one falsifiable hypothesis, minimal verified fix.

The file declares its own license as MIT. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

2.9 KB, 542 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Systematic Debugging

Debug by finding the cause, not by trying fixes. One loop: reproduce → evidence → hypothesis → minimal fix. Skip a phase only when you can state why its output is already known.

Phase 1 — Reproduce

  • Get a failing reproduction before changing anything: the exact command or interaction, its full output, and the exit status.
  • Shrink it to the smallest input and scope that still fails.
  • If the failure is intermittent, record the observed frequency and conditions instead of pretending it is deterministic.
  • No reproduction yet means the work is still investigation, not fixing.

Phase 2 — Gather Evidence

  • Read the actual error, stack trace, and logs before forming opinions; quote the relevant lines, not a paraphrase.
  • Compare against a known-working state: recent diffs, a passing sibling case, another environment.
  • Evidence stays boundary-safe: never dump environment variables, credentials, tokens, or full config files into output or logs. For sensitive values, log names, lengths, or shapes — not contents.
  • Locate the failure boundary: the last point where state is known good and the first point where it is wrong.

Phase 3 — One Hypothesis, Tested Minimally

  • State exactly one falsifiable hypothesis: "X causes this; if true I will observe A, if false I will observe B."
  • Test it with the smallest probe that can refute it (a log line, a focused test, a narrowed input) — not a speculative code change.
  • Record the result before moving on. A refuted hypothesis is progress; an untested one is noise.
  • After three consecutive refuted hypotheses, stop and reassess: question the layer you are looking at, widen the evidence, or surface what you know and ask the user. Do not keep guessing.

Phase 4 — Fix the Cause Once

  • Fix the verified cause, not the symptom, with one coherent change.
  • Re-run the original reproduction and cite its fresh result; the fix claim needs the same evidence standard as any completion claim.
  • Add a regression test when feasible; when it is not (no harness, out-of-scope infrastructure), say so explicitly.
  • Revert experiment leftovers: probes, temporary logging, disabled checks.

Anti-Patterns

  • Shotgun debugging: changing several things at once and re-running to "see if it helps."
  • Stacking a second speculative fix on top of an unverified first one.
  • Silencing the symptom (catch-and-ignore, retry loops, widened timeouts) while the cause is unknown.
  • Declaring "fixed" without a fresh run of the original reproduction.

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.

Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most debug triage skills give in 542 tokens

Counted across 839 of the 1,149 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-08-07

  • Investigate root cause before proposing any fixin 102 of 839, across 67 files
  • Read error messages completelyin 89 of 839, across 49 files
  • Create a failing test case before fixingin 84 of 839, across 46 files
  • Reproduce the issue consistentlyin 82 of 839, across 41 files
  • Change one variable at a timein 82 of 839, across 42 files
  • Check recent changesin 74 of 839, across 36 files
  • Write the regression test before fixingin 74 of 839, across 40 files
  • Fix the root cause not the symptomin 60 of 839, across 45 files
  • Implement a single fix at a timein 59 of 839, across 20 files
  • Trace data flow backward to the sourcein 50 of 839, across 20 files
  • Remove all debug instrumentationin 49 of 839, across 13 files
  • Form a single hypothesisin 48 of 839, across 18 files

Said here and by no other author read

  • keep logged evidence free of secrets or sensitive values
  • fix the verified cause with one coherent change
  • rerun the original reproduction and cite the fresh result
  • revert experimental probes and temporary logging

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.

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