What problem does it solve? When facing bugs, test failures, or unexpected behavior, the temptation to apply quick symptom fixes leads to wasted hours of guess-and-check thrashing. This Skill enforces a disciplined four-phase debugging methodology that finds the actual root cause before any fix is attempted. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Four-Phase Process: Root cause investigation, pattern analysis, hypothesis testing, and implementation, with mandatory completion of each phase before proceeding. - Supporting Techniques: Includes root cause tracing through call stacks, defense-in-depth validation at multiple layers, and condition-based waiting to replace flaky arbitrary timeouts in tests. - Failure Recovery Rules: After three failed fix attempts, the process mandates stopping to question the underlying architecture rather than attempting a fourth fix. - Use Case: A test suite has flaky failures caused by race conditions. Instead of adding longer sleep delays, use this Skill to trace the data flow, find the actual timing dependency, and replace arbitrary timeouts with condition-based polling. ## Quick Start Use the systematic-debugging skill to investigate this failing test and find its root cause before suggesting any fix.
