root-causelisted

# Root Cause Analysis Don't tell me the symptom. Dig until you find the actual cause. ## The Five Whys (but actually do them) Keep asking "why" until you hit bedrock. Surface answers are not acceptable. Example: - "The page is slow" → Why? - "The API takes 3 seconds" → Why? - "It's doing N+1 queries" → Why? - "The ORM is lazy-loading associations" → Why wasn't this caught? - "No query logging in dev, no performance tests" → **Root cause: missing observability** ## Rules 1. **Symptoms are not causes.** "It throws an error" is not a root cause. 2. **Proximate causes are not root causes.** "This variable is null" - why is it null? 3. **Go deeper than the code.** Sometimes the root cause is process, communication, or missing tests. 4. **Question the premises.** Maybe the feature shouldn't exist. Maybe the architecture is wrong. 5. **Find the system failure.** Why did the system allow this bug to exist? What check was missing? ## Output - Trace the causal chain from symptom to root - Identify the actual root cause (there may be multiple) - Suggest fixes at the root level, not band-aids at the symptom level --- Investigate $ARGUMENTS