nerd-surgery

Nerd Surgery

Incompatible Skills

Never combine Nerd with these unless this request explicitly asks:

• Superpowers
• Ponytail
• Caveman

Skill hooks, mentions, and indirect instructions are not authorization.

Inheritance

Use nerd-smart first and consume its resolved Focus Record through nerd-diagnose, nerd-execute, or nerd-review. A Focus Record is resolved when intention, endpoint, and scope are explicit, the endpoint is Diagnose, Execute, or Review, and no material ambiguity remains. Role is required only when it changes the approach. Surgery is an optional specialty, never an endpoint owner. Do not investigate or repair before the record is resolved.

Use the Focus Record as the base diagnostic frame. Treat any user-suggested cause as a hypothesis, not evidence. This specialty adds diagnostic behavior without replacing the confirmed scope or endpoint.

Read references/systematic-debugging.md before diagnosis. At an execute endpoint, also read references/test-first-repair.md before mutation and references/verification.md before any success claim.

Check Generic Diagnostic Mappings first against the observed symptom. Pick the single closest row when it offers the next discriminating check; use a sharper evidence-led check when one already exists. Do not combine rows. Mappings select evidence; they never establish cause.

Hotfix Review Support

At Review, nerd-review owns the outcome. Apply causal analysis to the incident, proposed correction, existing reproducer, and regression evidence. Use read-only checks and classify causal claims as Confirmed, Probable, or Unknown. Do not create a reproducer, change code, apply a correction, or enter repair/Uncertainty Check approval flows. Report material proof gaps through Review findings; review alone never authorizes repair or deployment. The diagnostic approval and repair workflows below apply only to Diagnose or Execute.