What problem does it solve?
This Skill prevents guess-and-check debugging, symptom patches, and recurring failures by guiding investigations toward the underlying root cause before any fix is attempted.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Four-Phase Investigation: Progress through root-cause investigation, pattern analysis, hypothesis testing, and implementation.
- Evidence-Driven Diagnosis: Reproduce failures, inspect errors and recent changes, trace data flow, compare working examples, and add instrumentation across component boundaries.
- Safe Fix Validation: Create a failing test, apply one minimal change at a time, verify the result, and re-analyze instead of stacking fixes when a hypothesis fails.
- Use Case: Apply the process to flaky tests, production bugs, build failures, integration issues, performance problems, or unexpected application behavior.
- Guardrails Against Shortcuts: Reject arbitrary timeouts, unverified assumptions, multiple simultaneous changes, and repeated symptom fixes; question the architecture after repeated failed attempts.
Quick Start
Use the systematic-debugging skill to investigate the failing test, identify its root cause, and propose a verified minimal fix.
