Skip to main content

Debugging with a coding agent

A coding agent debugging one of your templates does the same job the rest of this section describes, and gets it wrong the same way anyone does when nobody tells them the order: it opens a page image first and pays, in context and in turns, for the answer problems.txt was giving away for free.

Two things fix that. A skill that ships the order, and a copy of these docs an agent can fetch in one request.

Install the skill​

This repository is a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Register it, then install the plugin — both from the agent's own prompt:

/plugin marketplace add https://gitlab.com/c0va23/pdf-server.git
/plugin install pdf-template-debug@pdf-server

Nothing to invoke afterwards: the agent reaches for the skill by itself whenever a template needs fixing rather than merely rendering. Pick up later versions with /plugin marketplace update pdf-server.

A skill is instructions, not a tool. It adds no surface to your project — it changes which of the surfaces already documented here the agent reaches for, and in what order:

  • read problems.txt before anything else, and stop there when it answers;
  • search the quoted text from a problem line back into the template source, instead of opening the rendered HTML to look for it;
  • keep one --debug-enabled container warm for the whole session, instead of paying for a cold browser on every attempt;
  • open a page image last, for the questions only a page image answers.

All it needs from you is what the rest of this section needs: the image running with the debug surface on, and your templates bind-mounted into it.

Any other agent: the docs in one fetch​

The site publishes a machine-readable mirror of these pages, following the llms.txt convention. Hand an agent one of these URLs rather than asking it to crawl the rendered site:

URLWhat it returns
https://pdf.c0va23.dev/llms.mdthe index — one link per section, one per page
https://pdf.c0va23.dev/llms-debugging-templates.mdthis whole section as one file, in reading order
https://pdf.c0va23.dev/llms-full.mdevery page at once
https://pdf.c0va23.dev/md/guides/render-problems.mdany single page, as raw Markdown

There is one section file per task section of this documentation, named after it; llms.md lists them all. A section is sized so that an agent handed the link can do most of that kind of work from it and follow the links for the rest.