hypothesis-debugging
Skill0 starsChanged 5 months agoMITView on GitHub
Hypothesis-driven debugging protocol — reproduce, isolate, hypothesize, test, fix, document. Use when debugging a failure, a failing test, a flaky CI run, or a production error. Write a ranked hypothesis table before any fix; find the root cause, not a workaround. The operational form of the vibe-engineer-skills principle "hypothesis before help.
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1 rule. About 0 are common, 1 is distinctive, and 0 are very specific to this project.
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Common · estimate
Many files like this have a rule of this kind.
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- Common
- Distinctive
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- Distinctive: line 23
Write a ranked hypothesis table BEFORE touching the code.
≈ “Common” is an estimate: at least 1 in 5 of the 308,232 skill files we read have a rule of the same kind, not the same words. “Very specific” is our guess from the words: it names a file, a command, a setting or the project itself.
Files
Hypothesis debugging
A six-phase protocol for debugging. Do not write a fix until you have a ranked hypothesis table and a confirmed root cause.
Tradeoff: bias toward finding the cause over shipping a fast patch. For an obvious one-line typo, use judgment.
1. Reproduce
Make the failure happen on demand. Capture the exact error and stack trace, the repro steps, and expected versus actual. Consistent or intermittent? Intermittent points at state, timing, or environment.
2. Isolate
Narrow the scope. Check recent commits (git log --oneline -10) and diffs, then reduce to the smallest input that still fails.
3. Hypothesize
Write a ranked hypothesis table BEFORE touching the code.
| # | Hypothesis | Likelihood | How to test |
| 1 | Most likely cause, stated specifically | High | A cheap yes/no test |
| 2 | Second possibility | Medium | A specific test |
| 3 | Less likely cause | Low | A specific test |
Each row names a concrete cause and has a test that can run.
4. Test
Work the table top to bottom. Confirm or refute each row. A confirmed hypothesis is the root cause; a refuted one is removed. Do not skip to a fix on a hunch.
5. Fix
With the cause confirmed: the smallest change that addresses it, traced for side effects, verified against the Phase 1 reproduction, plus a regression test that fails on the old code.
Root cause, not workaround. Reject try/catch swallowing, defensive masking checks, renamed symptom variables, mocked broken dependencies, and asserting the bug away. A workaround that passes tests hides the bug and propagates it.
6. Document
Record the root cause, the fix and why it addresses the cause, and the prevention: the regression test, the bug category, and how to catch this class faster next time.
See full content and worked examples at https://github.com/HermeticOrmus/hypothesis-debugging-skills.
Other versions1 project uses a version of this.
Word for word · 0
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Wrote their own version · 1
- mohmaedeslam00116/waypower★ 0same name
How matches are found. Word for word: the exact same text. Edited: shares passages with this file (“99% same” means 99% of its five-word phrases also appear here; 10% or more counts). Their own version: similar meaning, or, weakest, the same name. We can’t tell which project had it first. Projects are counted among the 200 most-starred candidates, and mentions are links to the repository we found, up to 50 per site, so both counts are a floor.
In this repository2 other files it gives its agents.
- CLAUDE.mdCLAUDE.md
- .cursor/rules/hypothesis-debugging.mdcCursor rule
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