Debugging & error recovery

Reading failures properly, and getting an agent out of a loop where it keeps retrying the same broken approach.

Installation

$ npx skills add addyosmani/agent-skills

The CLI's unit is the repository, so this installs everything in addyosmani/agent-skills, not debugging-and-error-recovery alone. It writes into whichever agent directories it finds — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Zed.

Summary

Reading failures properly, and getting an agent out of a loop where it keeps retrying the same broken approach.

  • Reach for it when the agent has been stuck on the same error for six turns and is getting more confident, not less.
  • Sits in Operate & maintain — production reality: debugging, performance, instrumentation, and writing down why the system is the way it is.
  • Stack-agnostic — nothing in it assumes a particular language or framework.
  • Published by Addy Osmani. Well regarded, but not the vendor of the thing it covers.
  • Installing pulls the whole addyosmani/agent-skills repository: this catalogue lists 19 other entries from it, and the repo may hold more.

Where it sits in delivery

Operate & maintainProduction reality: debugging, performance, instrumentation, and writing down why the system is the way it is.Everything in Operate

The skill itself

The full text lives with its publisher and changes when they change it. Read it there rather than here — a mirrored copy of somebody else's procedure goes stale silently, and this page would have no way of telling you.

Related

More in Operate & maintain