Investigation Notes

Overview

During bug investigations, maintain a lightweight scratch document as external memory. This prevents re-reading code you've already analyzed, losing track of which hypothesis you're testing, and silently drifting into rabbit holes.

Core principle: Write it down once, refer to it later. Re-reading your one-line note is faster than re-reading 200 lines of source.

Always keep the document up to date with your current focus, hypotheses, and learnings from code reads and tests.

Always refer to the document before re-reading code or forming a new hypothesis. If the information is there, use it. If it's not sufficient, read the code, then write a better note.

The document never takes priority over writing or running a test. If you're choosing between updating notes and writing a test, write the test. Update the notes after.