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Parallel Debugging (Competing Hypotheses)

Debug multi-cause bugs by splitting them into competing hypotheses, investigating them in parallel, and arbitrating the true root cause from evidence.

Dev & CodingIntermediate★ 40,414⑂ 4,305AI score 7/10Last updated: Oct 5, 2026

What it does

  • Generates hypotheses across six failure-mode categories: logic, data, state, integration, resource, environment.
  • Runs those hypotheses as parallel investigations and grades findings as direct / correlational / testimonial / absence evidence.
  • Enforces file:line citations and explicit High/Medium/Low confidence ratings.
  • Arbitrates results into confirmed / plausible / falsified / inconclusive, ranks them, and flags compound root causes.
  • Ends with a fix-validation checklist (repro passes, no new issues, edge cases, tests updated).

Who it's for

  • Engineers stuck on a bug with several plausible causes.
  • Anyone writing a root-cause analysis or postmortem for an incident spanning multiple services.
  • Teams that want to remove confirmation bias from debugging sessions.

Examples

  1. Intermittent 500s: run stale-cache, connection-pool exhaustion, and API contract drift as three parallel hypotheses, then rank by evidence strength.
  2. Works locally, fails in production: pull candidates from the environment and integration categories (missing env vars, version drift, timezone behavior).
  3. Slowly growing memory usage: enumerate leak candidates under the resource category and conclude with cited file:line evidence.

· · · Install guide · · ·

Try it now, no install

Paste this into Claude to use the skill without installing anything.

Read the instructions in this file and follow them to help me:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wshobson/agents/HEAD/plugins/agent-teams/skills/parallel-debugging/SKILL.md

What I want: (describe your task here)

If Claude can't open the link, open it yourself and paste the contents instead.

↓ If it works for you, download the ZIP below and install it. Then it runs on its own — no pasting each time.

Install in the Claude app (no terminal)
  1. Download the ZIP with the button below.
  2. In Claude, open Settings → Capabilities and turn on 'Code execution and file creation'. (one time)
  3. Go to Customize → Skills → + → 'Upload a skill' and upload the ZIP.
↓ Download ZIP
Install in Claude Code

Let Claude do it — paste this into Claude Code

Install the skill I found on Claude Skill Mart.
Copy the plugins/agent-teams/skills/parallel-debugging folder from the GitHub repo wshobson/agents into my ~/.claude/skills/parallel-debugging/.
When it's done, tell me in one line what this skill can do.

Install with a command instead

git clone https://github.com/wshobson/agents.git /tmp/agents && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r /tmp/agents/plugins/agent-teams/skills/parallel-debugging ~/.claude/skills/

⚠ This is a third-party skill. Check the source repository before installing.

  1. Open a terminal.
  2. Clone the repository into a temp folder: git clone https://github.com/wshobson/agents.git /tmp/agents
  3. Create the skills directory if needed: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
  4. Copy just this skill: cp -r /tmp/agents/plugins/agent-teams/skills/parallel-debugging ~/.claude/skills/
  5. Restart Claude Code.
  6. Trigger it with a prompt like "Split this bug into competing hypotheses and investigate them in parallel."
  7. Optionally clean up: rm -rf /tmp/agents.