Spent some time developing an improved version of the systematic-debugging skill for claude code. Might be helpful for some! https://github.com/pytholic/claude-skills/tree/main/systematic-debugging Here’s what our version adds or improves: Triage gate — original runs all four phases on every bug; new version lets trivial bugs skip the framework entirely Natural language skill discovery — original hard-codes testing-patterns ; instead describe the kind of skill to look for with inline fallbacks Phase 1 tracing is concrete — original lists a generic 5-step trace; new version specifies exact actions (read stack bottom-to-top, add logging at function boundaries, inspect arguments at each boundary) Evidence collection is explicit and enforced — requires writing them down in Phase 2’s template before any fix Hypothesis template with Evidence field — original says “formulate one hypothesis” in prose; new version forces structured output with a mandatory evidence field Escalation template for the 3-failure stop rule — provides a structured format documenting all three failed hypotheses and the suspected deeper issue Checklist split into process vs. correctness — original mixes them into one flat list Removed “Common Debugging Scenarios” — original has scenario-specific recipes (test failures, runtime errors, intermittent failures) that risk the agent pattern-matching to a fix instead of investigating root cause Removed “Success Metrics” — the 95% claim is unverifiable and doesn’t change agent behavior Removed “Pattern Analysis” as a separate phase — original’s Phase 2 (compare working vs. broken code) is folded into Phase 1’s tracing steps, keeping the framework to four focused phases without a redundant step More aggressive skill description — includes explicit trigger keywords (“debug”, “broken”, “not working”, “stack trace”) to reduce under-triggering Original version can be found here . submitted by /u/rajahaseeb147
Originally posted by u/rajahaseeb147 on r/ClaudeCode
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