Debugging Prompt — the Investigation Contract
"Fix this error" gets guesses. The investigation contract gets a ten-stage diagnosis: facts separated from assumptions, alternatives weighed, fixes justified.
View Resource →Build debugging prompts from symptoms, environment, and reproduction steps — root cause first, fix second.
"Fix this error" gets guesses. The investigation contract gets a ten-stage diagnosis: facts separated from assumptions, alternatives weighed, fixes justified.
View Resource →An exception is a symptom, not a diagnosis: trace from the throw site back to the root trigger, with the runtime checklist on the table.
View Resource →Measure before reasoning: find WHERE the time goes, separate latency from memory from throughput, and think at production scale.
View Resource →Stabilize, then diagnose: impact first, rollback options before intervention, timeline from the deploy history — forensic discipline under fire.
View Resource →AI is a strong debugging partner and a confident wrong one: the fast-investigation contract that keeps its speed and removes its overconfidence.
View Resource →It fails once in twenty runs: the occurrence pattern IS the evidence. Hunt the difference between failing and passing runs — forensically.
View Resource →The error only happens for some inputs: find the implicit contract those inputs violate, with the runtime checklist as the suspect list.
View Resource →Support says it happens; nobody can make it happen. Turn a vague bug report — symptoms, environment, expected vs actual — into a reproduction strategy.
View Resource →Forensic-grade RCA: most likely cause plus alternatives, each with supporting AND contradicting evidence — and unknowns that stay unknown.
View Resource →Read the trace bottom-up, find the frame where the bad value entered, and name what made it bad — the trace is a map, not an answer.
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