cadence: Skill for Claude Code

Systematic debugging (ledger-backed)

Debugging fails in a predictable way: you form one hypothesis, find something consistent with it, and stop. The trail lives in a transcript nobody rereads, so the next person — often you — starts over.

This skill fixes the second problem structurally and the first by discipline. Every hypothesis becomes a row in CADENCE's assumption ledger, tied to one anchor recommendation, and it must be closed validated or rejected before you may name a root cause.

What is and is not enforced. The ledger is real: cadence assumption rows persist, and the conclusion query below is deterministic. But CADENCE does not refuse a conclusion the way settle refuses a phase — no gate fires, nothing exits non-zero if you conclude with hypotheses open. This is a gate you honor, not one the engine enforces. Its value is that afterwards anyone can run one command and see whether you honored it. Do not describe this skill, in a SUMMARY or anywhere else, as CADENCE enforcing debugging discipline.

Preconditions

• A symptom you can reproduce. If you cannot reproduce it, that is the finding — report it and gather data. It is not a licence to start hypothesizing; an unreproducible symptom cannot falsify anything, so every hypothesis you form is unfalsifiable by construction.
• Read the error first, completely. Stack trace, line numbers, exit code. A surprising number of bugs are already named in the text you skipped.
• .cadence/ is initialized. The ledger commands write there. In a fresh worktree run cadence onboard first.
• You have not already applied a fix. If you have, say so — you are now debugging two things, and the fix may be masking the symptom.

Pipeline

1. File the anchor

Every assumption must belong to a recommendation — assumption add requires --rec. File one for the bug before forming any hypothesis:

cadence recommendation add \
  --title "bug: <symptom in one line>" \
  --summary "<what you observe, and the exact reproduction>" \
  --priority medium --readiness needs-evidence \
  --area <area> --file <path/to/suspect.ts>