debug-helper skill

Overview

This skill is a Debug Helper that provides a systematic methodology to find and fix bugs, errors, exceptions, and performance issues. It guides you through reproducibility, targeted information collection, scope reduction, root-cause analysis, and verification of fixes. It produces a concise diagnostic report template to communicate findings and preventive measures.

How this skill works

The skill inspects error messages, stack traces, logs, environment and recent code changes to build a clear problem picture. It recommends targeted commands and patterns for log analysis, uses divide-and-conquer (binary search) to localize faults, and suggests minimal reproducible cases and rubber-duck debugging to expose logic errors. Finally, it outlines verification steps and a report format for remediation and prevention.

When to use it

• When you encounter runtime errors, crashes, or uncaught exceptions.
• When performance is degraded (slow responses, high CPU or memory).
• When logs are noisy and you need to trace request or error origins.
• When a bug is intermittent and you must establish reproducible steps.
• When you need a clear remediation plan and preventive actions.

Best practices

• Start by reproducing the issue and capturing a minimal test case.
• Collect full error messages, stack traces, environment and dependency versions.
• Use binary search (log/feature toggles) to narrow the failing region quickly.
• Analyze logs with focused grep/time filters and follow request IDs.
• Validate fixes with tests and a repeatable verification procedure.

Example use cases

• Investigating a null reference or index-out-of-range runtime exception in production.
• Tracing a slow API to an N+1 database query or blocking I/O inside a loop.
• Locating memory leak sources by comparing heap usage across deployments.
• Building a minimal reproducible example to share with teammates or issue trackers.
• Generating a concise problem diagnostic report for postmortem or release notes.

FAQ