Systematic Debugging
Root-cause a bug with a hypothesis-driven loop instead of shotgun edits. Use when a bug isn't obvious after the first look, or when asked to "find out why" something fails.
Install
$ agentstack add skill-jnmetacode-skillet-systematic-debugging ✓ scanned · ✓ verified, works with Claude Code, Cursor, and more.
Security review
✓ PassedNo issues found. Passed automated security review. · v0.1.0 How review works →
- ✓ Prompt-injection patterns
- ✓ Secret / credential exfiltration
- ✓ Dangerous shell & filesystem operations
- ✓ Untrusted network calls
- ✓ Known-malicious package signatures
What it can access
- ● Network access Used
- ✓ Filesystem access No
- ✓ Shell / process execution No
- ✓ Environment & secrets No
- ✓ Dynamic code execution No
From automated source analysis of v0.1.0. “Used” means the capability is present in the source — more access means more to trust, not that it’s unsafe.
Verified badge
Passed review? Show it. Paste this badge into your README, it links to the public security report.
Links to your public security report.[](https://agentstack.voostack.com/security/report/skill-jnmetacode-skillet-systematic-debugging) Reliability & compatibility
Declared compatibility
Compatibility is declared by the source manifest. End-to-end runtime verification is coming, see below.
We're building live execution health for every listing: tool-call success rate, median latency, uptime, and last-checked timestamps, measured, not self-reported. It isn't live yet, so we don't show numbers we can't stand behind.
How agent discovery & health will work →About
systematic-debugging
Never fix what you can't reproduce; never explain what you haven't observed. The loop is: reproduce → observe → hypothesize → test the hypothesis → narrow. One variable at a time.
Procedure
- Reproduce first. Find the smallest, fastest command that shows the
failure deterministically. If it's flaky, make the loop tight (while ./repro; do :; done) and treat flakiness itself as a clue (timing, ordering, shared state).
- Read the actual error. The full message, the first stack frame in
your own code, and the line right before things went wrong. Resist pattern-matching to a familiar failure — verify this one.
- State a falsifiable hypothesis ("the cache returns stale entries after
a restart") and pick the cheapest observation that could kill it: a log line, an assertion, a debugger breakpoint, one curl.
- Bisect the space, whichever axis is cheapest:
- history:
git bisect run ./repro - data: half the failing input, recurse
- stack: confirm the bad value at the boundary between two layers, then
descend into the guilty one only
- The fix must explain the symptom. Before writing it, say why this
cause produces exactly this behavior. If the explanation is fuzzy, you've found a bug, maybe not the bug.
- Prove it: the repro from step 1 now passes, AND a new regression test
fails without the fix. Then look for siblings — the same mistake usually exists elsewhere (grep for the pattern you just fixed).
Anti-patterns
- Changing two things between observations — you learn nothing from the result.
- "It works now" without knowing why it failed — it will be back.
- Adding sleeps to fix timing issues — that's hiding the race, not fixing it.
- Debugging through the framework before confirming your own code's inputs
and outputs at the boundary.
Source & license
This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.
- Author: jnMetaCode
- Source: jnMetaCode/skillet
- License: MIT
- Homepage: https://github.com/jnMetaCode/local-agent-toolkit
Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.
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Versions
- v0.1.0 Imported from the upstream source.