Hypothesis debugging

A six-phase protocol for debugging. Do not write a fix until you have a ranked hypothesis table and a confirmed root cause.

Tradeoff: bias toward finding the cause over shipping a fast patch. For an obvious one-line typo, use judgment.

1. Reproduce

Make the failure happen on demand. Capture the exact error and stack trace, the repro steps, and expected versus actual. Consistent or intermittent? Intermittent points at state, timing, or environment.

2. Isolate

Narrow the scope. Check recent commits (git log --oneline -10) and diffs, then reduce to the smallest input that still fails.

3. Hypothesize

Write a ranked hypothesis table BEFORE touching the code.