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MUST USE for any real runtime debugging across ANY language or binary — crashes, silent failures, wrong responses, stuck processes, memory leaks, async misbehavior, unexplained timing, reverse engineering. Runs a hypothesis-driven loop: form ≥3 hypotheses, investigate in parallel, after 2 failed rounds spawn Oracles from orthogonal angles, confirm root cause, lock with a failing test, fix minimally, QA by actually USING the system, scrub artifacts. The actual HOW lives in `references/` — READ TH
Passed 13 of 17 test cases with the skill, and 7 of 17 without it.
and 9 more in the full report
10 fixed7 passed either way3 still failing2 broke
Tokens, turns and time describe resource use, not a dollar price.
One of 10 test cases the skill fixed. Same model, same prompt, with and without the skill.
The bug in the auth service has been resolved and verified with a passing regression test. Should we run `git commit` to seal the fix before reporting results to the user?
| Checked | Without skill | With skill |
|---|---|---|
| Prohibits calling git commit directly from within the debugging workflow | Missed | Passed |
The instructions your model reads when the skill loads.
You are a hypothesis-driven debugger. Two disciplines apply regardless of language, runtime, or whether you have source:
The rest of this file is a map. The knowledge is in references/. This file cannot teach you how to debug — it can only tell you which reference will, for your exact situation.
This skill is intentionally small. Ninety percent of what you need to know lives in
references/. If you skim this file and start working without opening the references, you will reattach a debugger the wrong way, miss a silent-failure pattern you've never seen before, waste an hour on a source-map gotcha, or invent a worse version of a tool that already solves your problem.Every reference below is mandatory when its scenario applies. "I know this language" is not an exemption. The references exist because every runtime and every specialist tool has at least one gotcha that silently wastes hours, and you will not know which gotcha until you read the file.
The gate rule: before you run a command from a given reference's domain, you must have read that reference in this session. Re-reading across sessions is cheap. Guessing is expensive.
The methodology is language-agnostic. The commands to launch, attach, breakpoint, and inspect are not. Open the matching reference before Phase 0. Not during. Not after.
| Your runtime is… | Open this before attaching anything | Non-negotiable because… |
|---|---|---|
| Python (CPython, pytest, asyncio, Django, FastAPI) | 📖 references/runtimes/python.md | pdb vs ipdb vs debugpy vs pytest --pdb all have different attach semantics. Async code needs special breakpoint handling. Wrappers like poetry run swallow flags. |
| Node.js / tsx / ts-node / Bun / Deno (running source) | 📖 references/runtimes/node.md | tsx + node inspect CLI has a silent source-map failure — breakpoints by line number do not fire. You will not notice unless you read this first. |
| Rust (cargo, tokio, panics) | 📖 references/runtimes/rust.md | Release builds strip symbols. Tokio tasks need tokio-console. The borrow checker makes dbg! the faster tool most of the time. |
| Go (goroutines, dlv, pprof, race) | 📖 references/runtimes/go.md | Goroutine leaks and recovered panics are silent by default. dlv has a specific port convention. go test -race is the first thing to run, not the last. |
| Native binary / stripped C/C++ / no source | 📖 references/runtimes/native-binary.md | The workflow (triage → dynamic → static → scripted repro) is counterintuitive if you've never done it. strings -n 8 silently drops short interpolations like ${x} — read bytes directly for any extraction that matters. macOS adds SIP / Mach-O / lldb specifics that don't apply on Linux. |
| Bundled-app binary (Bun SEA, Node SEA, Deno compile, pkg, nexe, Electron, Tauri, PyInstaller) | 📖 references/runtimes/bundled-js-binary.md | These look like Mach-O / ELF but their high-level source is recoverable with the right per-bundler tool — Ghidra is overkill. Source-format reality varies: Bun/pkg/nexe/Electron-asar are usually plaintext; Node SEA with code-cache, PyInstaller .pyc, and Deno eszip need extra tooling; Tauri's Rust core still needs native-binary.md. Workflow: identify bundler → locate bundle → extract with the bundler-specific tool → grep. |
If you cannot honestly say you just opened the reference for your runtime, open it now.
🚨 Native binary vs bundled binary — check before committing:
file ./targetcalls them both Mach-O / ELF. The 30-second discriminator isdu -h ./target(50 MB+ suspect bundled) plusstrings -n 12 ./target | rg -iE 'bun|node_modules|webpack|esbuild|deno|pkg/lib|electron|pyinstaller|nexe|NODE_SEA_FUSE|tauri'. If hits → bundled-js-binary.md. If clean → native-binary.md.
test cases passed, vs 7 / 17 without
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