Systematic debugging
Reproduce, narrow, hypothesise, test one variable at a time — instead of changing four things and rerunning.
Installation
$ npx skills add obra/superpowersThe CLI's unit is the repository, so this installs everything in obra/superpowers, not systematic-debugging alone. It writes into whichever agent directories it finds — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf, Zed.
Summary
Reproduce, narrow, hypothesise, test one variable at a time — instead of changing four things and rerunning.
- Reach for it when the bug has survived two speculative fixes and is starting to cost a day.
- 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 Jesse Vincent. Well regarded, but not the vendor of the thing it covers.
- Installing pulls the whole obra/superpowers repository: this catalogue lists 13 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
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addyosmani/web-quality-skills - Core Web VitalsLCP, INP and CLS: what moves each one, and what only looks like it does.
addyosmani/web-quality-skills - Debugging & error recoveryReading failures properly, and getting an agent out of a loop where it keeps retrying the same broken approach.
addyosmani/agent-skills