What problem does it solve? Random fixes and guess-and-check patching waste hours and introduce new bugs. This Skill enforces a disciplined four-phase debugging process that finds the root cause before any fix is attempted, preventing symptom-only patches and repeated failed fix attempts. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Four-Phase Process: Root cause investigation, pattern analysis, hypothesis testing, and implementation, each with explicit completion criteria. - Evidence Gathering: Read error messages, reproduce failures, check recent git changes, and trace data flow across component boundaries before proposing fixes. - Rule of Three: After three failed fixes, stop and question the architecture instead of attempting a fourth patch. - Use Case: A production API test fails intermittently. Follow Phase 1 to reproduce it with pytest, trace the bad value upstream through the call stack, form a single hypothesis, write a regression test, and fix the actual source rather than the symptom. ## Quick Start Use the systematic-debugging skill to investigate why this failing test produces a null value and find the root cause before fixing it.
