/systematic-debugging
Systematic Debugging
Root cause before any fix. Symptom patches are failure, not speed. Four phases, no shortcuts.
Used by 1 agent
What it does
The iron-law debugging loop: investigate, reproduce, hypothesize, isolate, fix, verify. Error messages get read completely, not skimmed. Reproduction gets confirmed before any code change. Multi-component systems get instrumented at boundaries before anyone proposes a patch. "Just try this one thing" is exactly the rationalization the skill exists to refuse.
Use it on every bug, every test failure, every unexpected behavior. Especially when you're tired, under time pressure, when a manager wants it fixed now, or after a previous fix didn't work. Don't skip because the bug "seems simple." Simple bugs have root causes too.
Outputs a root-cause writeup, a minimal fix that addresses the cause (not the symptom), a regression test that proves the fix, and a fresh verification run. Pairs with `test-driven-development` (the regression test), `verification-before-completion` (the proof step), and `dispatching-parallel-agents` (when multiple unrelated failures deserve parallel investigation).