What problem does it solve? Developers under time pressure often apply quick symptom fixes that fail repeatedly, wasting hours on 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 stop shortcut behavior during emergencies, plus a bisection script to find which test pollutes shared state. - Use Case: A test suite fails intermittently in CI. Instead of adding longer sleep calls, follow Phase 1 to gather evidence across components, trace the bad value to its source, then fix it once with a failing test proving the resolution. ## Quick Start Use the systematic-debugging skill to investigate this failing test and find its root cause before suggesting any fix.
