What problem does it solve? Developers under time pressure often apply quick symptom fixes that fail repeatedly, causing 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 verified implementation with explicit gates between phases. - 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. - Pressure Resistance: Red flags, rationalization tables, and anti-pattern lists that catch shortcut behavior during emergencies, plus a rule to question the architecture after three failed fixes. - Use Case: When a production test fails intermittently, follow Phase 1 to reproduce and gather evidence, trace the bad value to its source, then fix at the origin and add validation at every layer the data passes through. ## Quick Start Use the systematic-debugging skill to investigate this failing test and find its root cause before suggesting any fix.
