What problem does it solve? Developers under time pressure often apply quick symptom fixes that fail repeatedly, causing thrashing, flaky tests, and recurring production incidents. This Skill enforces a disciplined investigation workflow so bugs are fixed at their actual root cause instead of being patched superficially. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Four-Phase Debugging Process: Enforces Root Cause Investigation, Pattern Analysis, Hypothesis Testing, and Implementation in strict order, with explicit stop conditions when fixes fail. - Supporting Techniques: Includes references for root-cause tracing through call stacks, defense-in-depth validation at multiple layers, and condition-based waiting to replace flaky arbitrary timeouts in tests. - Pollution Bisection Script: Ships a find-polluter.sh script that runs test files one by one to identify which test creates unwanted files or state. - Use Case: A test suite fails intermittently in CI. Instead of adding longer sleep calls, follow the process to reproduce the failure, trace the data flow to the original trigger, form a single hypothesis, and verify the fix with a failing test first. ## Quick Start Ask the agent to debug a failing test or bug using the systematic-debugging skill and require root cause investigation before any fix is proposed.
