Systematic Debugging
Developer Toolsby obra
3/3 audits passMIT
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes
Systematic Debugging, from obra's superpowers collection, gives an agent one iron law: no fixes without root-cause investigation first. It works through four phases in order. Phase 1 is root-cause investigation: read error messages and stack traces completely, reproduce the problem consistently, check recent changes, add diagnostic logging at each component boundary in multi-component systems, and trace bad values backwards to their source. Phase 2 is pattern analysis against similar working code, Phase 3 forms and tests a hypothesis, and Phase 4 implements the fix. It also lists red flags and common rationalizations that signal the agent is guessing, plus supporting notes on root-cause tracing, defense in depth and condition-based waiting.
Use it for any test failure, production bug, build failure, performance problem or integration issue, and especially under time pressure or after a previous fix has failed. It deliberately refuses quick symptom patches; when investigation finds no root cause, it asks the agent to document what was checked and add handling and monitoring instead.
This is a skill for coding agents like Claude Code. It is MIT-licensed and can be imported into BusinessMCP as a playbook, though it is written for debugging code rather than business data.
What you can do with it
- Investigate a flaky test before changing any code
- Trace a bad value backwards through a deep call stack
- Instrument each layer of a CI to build to deploy pipeline
- Stop repeated guess-and-check fixes after a failed patch
Run it on your business data
Imported into BusinessMCP, Systematic Debugging becomes a playbook your AI business analyst applies to your connected GitHub repositories.
Use Systematic Debugging in BusinessMCPInstall it in a coding agent
One command adds Systematic Debugging to your project.
npx skills add https://github.com/obra/superpowers --skill systematic-debuggingHow we vetted it
- Source
- obra/superpowers at 5bf4e78
- Licence
- MIT
- Security audits (skills.sh)
- Gen Agent Trust Hub: Pass · Socket: Pass · Snyk: Pass
- Bundled scripts
- Yes — read them before installing
- Reviewed by hand
- mentions credential stores or key paths.
Checked 2026-09-25 against its skills.sh listing. How we vet skills
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Frequently asked questions
What are the four phases in Systematic Debugging?
Root-cause investigation, pattern analysis, hypothesis and testing, then implementation. The skill says each phase must be completed before moving to the next.
Is Systematic Debugging safe to install?
Our static scan flagged credential-read because one example shows inspecting keychain state (listing keychains and signing identities) while debugging a code-signing pipeline. It is illustrative diagnostic text, not an instruction to extract secrets, and the skill passed the skills.sh security auditors with no FAIL.
What if no root cause can be found?
The skill says to document what was investigated, implement appropriate handling such as a retry, timeout or error message, and add monitoring or logging for future investigation.
Keep exploring
Run Systematic Debugging against your whole business
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Use Systematic Debugging in BusinessMCP