What problem does it solve?
This skill eliminates the common pitfall of whack-a-mole debugging, where temporary symptom fixes create recurring bugs and make future issues harder to diagnose, by enforcing mandatory root cause investigation before any code changes are made.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Structured 4-Phase Workflow: Guides users through root cause investigation, pattern analysis, hypothesis testing, and implementation to ensure fixes address underlying issues, not just symptoms.
- Common Bug Pattern Matching: Includes checklists for race conditions, nil propagation, state corruption, and other frequent bug types to speed up diagnosis.
- Built-in Safety Guardrails: Enforces a 3-strike rule for failed hypotheses, flags high-blast-radius fixes (>5 files changed), and requires regression tests and full verification before completion.
- Use Case: Perfect for developers investigating production errors, stack traces, or unexpected behavior that has occurred multiple times in the same code area, indicating potential architectural issues.
Quick Start
Use the gstack-openclaw-investigate skill to debug the intermittent timeout errors reported in the user notification service.