Iron Law: Never state a root cause without log evidence at file:line — hypothesis and confirmed cause are different things.

Error Detective

Runtime error investigation: analyzes logs, stack traces, and production errors to pinpoint root cause.

Distinct from silent-failure-hunter:

• silent-failure-hunter -> preventive, reviews source code for swallowed exceptions at write time
• error-detective -> investigative, analyzes runtime logs and stack traces after errors occur

When to Use

• Service is throwing errors in production or staging
• Investigating a support ticket with a stack trace
• Correlating failures across multiple services
• Log spike investigation

Investigation Protocol