← ClaudeAtlas

tracing-root-causeslisted

Owns debugging end to end — reproduce, isolate, hypothesize, disconfirm, fix — with competing hypotheses, evidence ranked by strength, active disconfirmation, and a fix at the source rather than the symptom. Use for any bug, test failure, crash, regression, flaky or intermittent failure, performance problem, build failure, or unexpected behavior, BEFORE proposing or applying a fix; and for explaining why something happened (production incidents, surprising benchmark results) when no fix is on the table yet. Especially when an "obvious culprit" is tempting, when a previous fix did not work, or when time pressure makes guessing attractive. Supersedes superpowers:systematic-debugging as the house debugging skill.
bygama/skills · ★ 0 · AI & Automation · score 72
Install: claude install-skill bygama/skills
# Tracing root causes <!-- Methodology distilled from OMC's tracer agent (MIT), 2026-07-30. Provenance: Context-Engineering repo, docs/adrs/ADR-002-omc-salvage.md. Absorbed superpowers' systematic-debugging (v6.3.0), 2026-08-19: the phased spine, the iron law, the rationalization tables, and four techniques (references/techniques.md). MAT-46. Phase 3.4's "ask for help" beat, held back by MAT-46 D8, carried 2026-08-19 as bounded stall-escalation. MAT-93. Sections `### 2. Isolate`, `### 5. Fix`, `## Three strikes → question the architecture`, `## When the cause really is environmental`, and `## Rationalizations` are derived from superpowers' systematic-debugging/SKILL.md (v6.3.0), MIT License, Copyright (c) 2025 Jesse Vincent; base and remaining sections are original. Classified substantial-in-part (MAT-94); evidence: https://github.com/bygama/skills/blob/002ef05fd8b9aceab6f7ed9f14cb8b8fa076441b/work/mat-94-attribution-skills/DECISIONS.md. Full upstream permission notice: NOTICE (repo root). --> Explain outcomes through evidence, not narrative, and fix causes rather than symptoms. The failure mode this prevents: jumping from symptom to favorite explanation, collecting only confirming evidence, then patching where the error surfaced. ## The iron law ``` NO FIX WITHOUT A ROOT CAUSE FIRST ``` A fix proposed before the cause is known is a guess wearing a diff. This holds hardest exactly where it feels most e