Systematic Debugging

jkheadley/systematic-debugging

Structured 4-phase debugging methodology that prevents blind probing and guesswork. Forces root cause identification before any fix attempt. Use when encountering bugs, errors, unexpected behavior, test failures, or when something "just stopped working." Trigger words: debug, bug, error, broken, not working, fix this, something's wrong, investigate, root cause, why is this failing, trace the issue.

2k tokens

context cost

the whole folder, loaded on every use

files

instructions only

copies elsewhere

how many repositories repackaged it

stars on the repo

on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository

npx skills add https://github.com/JKHeadley/instar --skill systematic-debugging

How to use it

Copy the folder

Take jkheadley/systematic-debugging from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.