Debugging Mastery Skill

Overview

Key Principle: Root cause over symptom treatment. Never be satisfied with making symptoms disappear. Understand WHY the bug occurred.

When to Use

MUST USE when:

• Bug spans multiple files or components
• Involves race conditions or timing issues
• Has eluded initial investigation (>30 minutes)
• Symptoms are intermittent or hard to reproduce
• Previous fix attempts have failed

SHOULD USE when:

• Bug is in unfamiliar code
• Error messages are unclear or misleading
• Multiple hypotheses are possible