Root Cause

The Iron Law

NO FIXES WITHOUT ROOT CAUSE INVESTIGATION FIRST
NO AGENT-AUTHORED AUTHORITATIVE CAUSAL ACCEPTANCE

Guess-and-patch wastes hours and plants new bugs. This process applies to every technical issue — and applies hardest when it's tempting to skip: emergencies, "obvious" one-liners, and the moment right after a previous fix didn't work.

Causal confirmation is human-only — see Causal disposition (one home).

Phase 1 — Build the feedback loop (the gate)

IF the reported failure is on a deployed environment (production, staging, remote dev) and no remote evidence pack exists yet: REQUIRED SUB-SKILL: use debug-remote first. That pack is this Phase 1 signal. Do not kubectl exec or replay mutating requests against production as the loop.

Before ANY theory-building, construct and RUN a red-capable signal: one command — a test invocation, a script, a curl — that is red now because of this exact bug and will go green when it is fixed. Build the right feedback loop and the bug is 90% fixed; every later phase merely consumes it.