diagnose

Diagnose

A bug is a piece of work whose problem statement nobody confirmed — and debugging fails the way all work fails: at whichever stage got skipped. Read code until a cause feels plausible, fix that, call it done when nothing visibly objects — that is idea straight to implementation with everything between skipped, at minute scale.

The concept: the six geniuses, run at minute scale — no ceremony, no work file, the same order.

• Wonder — the code confirms the problem. A bug's confirmation line is a red reproduction: one command, run here, that shows the symptom the user reported — red while the bug lives, green when it dies. That command is the code saying "yes, that's it," and until it exists nothing is confirmed and no theory has standing; catching yourself building one first is the stop. A flaky symptom is confirmed by rate — raise the reproduction until signal beats noise. Then shrink the statement: cut inputs, config, and callers one at a time, re-running after each cut, until everything left is load-bearing. The wrong bug reproduced is the wrong problem confirmed.
• Invention and Discernment — hypotheses are options, and options earn survival. More than one before testing any: a single hypothesis explored is anchoring with extra steps. Each names its prediction — "if this is the cause, that change turns the reproduction green" — because a hypothesis that predicts nothing can only be believed, never attacked. Attack in rank order, one variable at a time; a dead hypothesis gets its one-line kill-reason, so nobody — including you, an hour from now — walks that path twice.
• Enablement and Tenacity — red to green, and green is fresh. The surviving hypothesis becomes a fix proven by the reproduction it was born from, and a regression test at a real seam where one exists — where none does, that absence is a finding about the design, recorded (one line in .genius/BACKLOG.md, where the project keeps one, so it gets built instead of remembered), never a license to skip. Close out clean: the rerun fresh, the debug scaffolding gone, the cause stated where the fix is recorded — a fix whose cause is unstated gets un-fixed by the next confident refactor. And what the hunt disproved on the way is corrected where it was written (errata skill) — the stated fact the reproduction contradicted, the pinned value that measured differently here; left standing, it is what sends the next session down the path this one just cleared.

Three failed fixes are not a third of the way to nine: they impeach the problem statement. Back to Wonder — question the reproduction, and what it silently assumes.