Root Cause

systematic-debugging gets you to the root cause. This stops you walking away from it once you are standing on it.

The Iron Rule

A mitigation is allowed. A mitigation that hides the fix you already found is not.

Shipping anything less than a fix obliges you, in the user-facing report, to:

1. name the true fix,
2. state what it costs (money, migration, schema change, a live run, scope, risk),
3. ask whether to do it — and wait for the answer.

A correctly labelled mitigation that stays silent about the fix you found is the same walk-away with better paperwork.

Once a human has knowingly chosen the mitigation, ship it and stop re-litigating. The goal is an informed decision, not the expensive fix.

(Precedence: if another rule tells you "symptom fixes are always failure" — a labelled mitigation shipped with the true fix offered is not failure. An unlabelled one is.)