Agent skill · operations · affaan-m
agent-introspection-debugging
Structured self-debugging workflow for AI agent failures using capture, diagnosis, contained recovery, and introspection reports. Use when an agent run fails and you need a reproducible diagnosis instead of a retry.
Why this skill is useful
Provides a structured workflow for diagnosing and recovering from agent failures, which the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
About 4k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-06. 238,342 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Agent Introspection Debugging Use this skill when an agent run is failing repeatedly, consuming tokens without progress, looping on the same tools, or drifting away from the intended task. This is a workflow skill, not a hidden runtime. It teaches the agent to debug itself systematically before escalating to a human. When to Activate Maximum tool call / loop-limit failures Repeated retries with no forward progress Context growth or prompt drift that starts degrading output quality File-system or environment state mismatch between expectation and reality Tool failures that are likely recoverable with diagnosis and a smaller corrective action Scope Boundaries Activate this skill for: capturing failure state before retrying blindly diagnosing common agent-specific failure patterns applying contained recovery actions producing a structured human-readable debug report Do not use this skill as the primary source for: feature verification after code changes; use verification-loop framework-specific debugging when a narrower ECC skill already exists runtime promises the current harness cannot enforce automatically Four-Phase Loop Phase 1: Failure Capture Before trying to recover, record the failure precisely. Capture: error type, message, and stack trace when available last meaningful tool call sequence what the agent was trying to do current context pressure: repeated prompts, oversized pasted logs, duplicated plans, or runaway notes current environment assumptions: cwd, branch, relevant service state, expected files Minimum capture template: Phase 2: Root-Cause Diagnosis Match the failure to a known pattern before changing anything. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills affaan-m/agent-introspection-debugging