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Systematic debugging

Skill openagentskills/betterskills/skills/engineering/systematic-debugging

Portable, open catalogue of agent skills for Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, Copilot, and other AI coding assistants.

Install
npx -y skills add openagentskills/betterskills --skill systematic-debugging

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Debugs failures using reproduce-isolate-fix-verify steps instead of random changes. Use when fixing bugs, flaky tests, production errors, or when the user says something is broken and the cause is unclear.

SKILL.md

1.5 KB, 328 tokens by cl100k_base, as published. Nobody here has run it

Systematic Debugging

Principles

  1. Reproduce before fixing
  2. One change at a time when testing hypotheses
  3. Evidence over assumptions — read logs, stack traces, metrics
  4. Smallest fix that addresses root cause, not symptoms

Workflow

- [ ] 1. Define expected vs actual behavior
- [ ] 2. Reproduce reliably (note env, data, steps)
- [ ] 3. Gather evidence (logs, traces, minimal repro)
- [ ] 4. Form hypothesis (single sentence)
- [ ] 5. Test hypothesis (instrument or experiment)
- [ ] 6. Implement fix
- [ ] 7. Verify fix + regression test
- [ ] 8. Document cause if non-obvious

Bisection

When regression timing is known:

  • git bisect for code regressions
  • Compare config/env between working and broken deploys

Flaky tests

  • Run with seed repetition (--repeat, loop N times)
  • Check time, network, parallelism, shared state
  • Prefer deterministic waits over sleep

Output while debugging

Report after each major step:

## Status
Reproduced: yes/no

## Evidence
- [log line, metric, stack snippet]

## Hypothesis
...

## Next step
...

Anti-patterns

  • Changing multiple unrelated things at once
  • Fixing without a test when tests exist
  • Masking errors with broad try/catch

What ships with it: 1 file

354 B alongside SKILL.md

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