Verify Before Filing

Your local pain is real. Your diagnosis of its cause and location may be wrong. Before asking an external project to change, prove the gap is on their side, not yours.

The single most common upstream-issue failure is not a formatting problem or a duplicate — it is a premise error: the workaround that motivated the issue was never verified to do anything, so the issue proposes a change that solves no real problem. This skill exists to catch that before you draft a single line.

1. The Failure Pattern

This is the sequence that produces bad upstream issues:

1. Encounter a problem (slow build, missing feature, broken behavior)
2. Find or inherit a local workaround (overrideAttrs, patch, monkey-patch)
3. ASSUME the workaround is necessary and correct (never verified)
4. Conclude: "upstream should support this so it's cached/builtin/default"
5. Draft a well-formatted issue proposing the change
6. File it → the workaround was a no-op; the issue is wrong