What problem does it solve? Debugging often produces quick patches that silence symptoms while the real bug survives, accumulating fragile workarounds that make the codebase harder to reason about. This Skill enforces a disciplined root-cause debugging methodology so fixes address the actual defect. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Root-Cause Tracing: Reproduce the bug first, then ask "why" repeatedly until the true cause is found, rather than guessing. - Anti-Pattern Detection: Resist nil-check guards that silence crashes, flag workarounds needing paragraph-long justifying comments, and grep for repeated instances of the same defective pattern. - Restart-Bug Heuristic: When something fails after restart, suspect stale persistent state (config files, caches, lock files, serialized state) before suspecting code, since code does not change between runs. - Use Case: A crash reappears after every app restart. Instead of adding another defensive check, the Skill directs you to inspect persisted state files, confirm that clearing one restores behavior, and implement state validation as the real fix. ## Quick Start Ask the AI to debug a recurring bug using the principle-fix-root-causes workflow, reproducing it first and tracing it to its root cause before writing any fix.
