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principle-fix-root-causes

principle-fix-root-causes

github.com/ericlitmanDevelopment54248 installsUpdated 2w ago
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About principle-fix-root-causes

This debugging skill is for developers investigating software faults. It focuses on finding the earliest wrong decision or unhandled state rather than patching symptoms, using reproduction, instrumentation, and pattern checks.

Key features

  1. 01Reproduce the fault first
  2. 02Trace causes step by step
  3. 03Inspect actual state with instrumentation
  4. 04Distinguish valid from invalid states
  5. 05Find and fix matching fault patterns

Use cases

  1. 01Investigate faults that appear after a restart
  2. 02Decide whether to handle a state or trace its origin
  3. 03Find bugs hidden by retries or guard logic

Install

Copy the command and run it in a terminal.

$npx skills add https://github.com/ericlitman/open-pstack --skill principle-fix-root-causes

After installing, type/principle-fix-root-causesin Claude Code to confirm it loaded.

Details

From the project README

Fix Root Causes

When debugging, fix the fault, not the place where it surfaced. The symptom is where a wrong state became visible. The root cause is the first place the system did something it should not do, or failed to handle a state it should handle.

Why: A symptom fix hides the evidence and leaves the fault free to surface somewhere else. Each one makes the system harder to reason about, because the code now carries a workaround for a bug that nobody named.

Pattern:

  • Reproduce first.
  • Ask "why" at each step until the answer is a wrong decision in the code, not a consequence of an earlier one.
  • When stuck, instrument. Read the actual error and the actual state. Do not guess.
  • Ask whether the state that triggered the symptom is legitimate. If the system may be in that state, the code that broke on it is the root cause, and handling the state there is the fix. If the state should never exist, a check where it broke hides the bug. Find what produced the state. Guards, retries, swallowed errors, clamped values, and discarded state are the usual ways to hide a bug.
  • When something fails only after a restart, suspect persisted state first: config files, caches, lock files, serialized state.
  • Check for the pattern, not just the instance. Find every place with the same fault and fix them all.
  • If a workaround needs a paragraph-long comment to justify it, the code is wrong. Fix the code, not the comment.
  • If the deciding fact took a deep dig to find, propose the cheap, always-on signal that would have shown it at first look.

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