dev-debugging-strategies

What problem does it solve?

This Skill provides systematic production debugging patterns to diagnose production failures, investigate regressions, and debug issues without an obvious root cause.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Hypothesis-Driven Framework: Structure investigations as numbered hypotheses to avoid confirmation bias.
• Temporal Analysis Filter: Quickly identify regression candidates and static bugs.
• Environment Before Code: Check infrastructure before diving into application code.
• CWD-First Diagnostic: Identify issues with Babel/Jest transform errors caused by CWD drift.
• Deeper Debugging Patterns: Explore CI vs Local Divergence, Webhook & Wire-Level inspection, and Documentation & Review-Bot Loops.
• Confident False-Negatives: Recognize and avoid tool dialect traps.
• Anti-Patterns: Identify common debugging mistakes and their solutions.
• Investigation Audit Pattern: Ensure accuracy and correctness in audits.
• Evidence-Gathering Commands: Use specific commands for tree membership, mtime listing, and more.
• Laravel Sanctum Credentials Triage: Triage login issues in Laravel SPAs.
• Code Review / Sibling Pattern Sweep: Identify and address pattern violations across the codebase.
• Pre-Commit Hook Stash for Root-Cause Isolation: Isolate pre-commit test failures.
• Playwright FE↔BE Contract Drift Triage: Inspect FE and BE interactions for issues.
• Doc-vs-Reality Drift: Verify README claims against implementation.
• Verifying Review-Bot Findings: Avoid chasing false positives from review bots.
• Playwright Visual-Verification Loop: Ensure visual correctness of UI features.
• Git Branch & Merge Hygiene: Maintain clean and efficient git workflows.
• CI Flake: Assertion Polling vs Click Ordering: Address CI assertion race conditions.
• Python Logging: Format Values Into the Message: Improve log readability.
• Specialist-Consult Priming with Full Entity-Space Counts: Provide accurate data for subagents.
• CI vs Local Divergence: Resolve version mismatches and other CI issues.
• Frontend: CSS Rules Present but Not Applied: Diagnose CSS rendering issues.
• Reviewer Blocker Triage: Verify code review blockers.
• Git Branch Hygiene: Maintain clean git branches.

Quick Start

Use the dev-debugging-strategies skill to investigate a production failure by formulating hypotheses and running diagnostics.