MasterMind: Debug

Hard bugs are lost by guessing and patching symptoms. This is the disciplined loop that finds the actual cause. Bug: $ARGUMENTS. Grounded in ~/.mastermind/engineering/core/rigor.md and ~/.mastermind/engineering/core/agent-loop.md.

The cardinal rule: understand the mechanism before you change a line. A fix you can't explain is a coincidence, not a fix.

The six phases

1. Build the feedback loop. This phase is the skill: the rest is mechanical once it exists.

   You need one command you have already run at least once, whose invocation and output you can paste. It has to be red-capable (it fails right now, because of this bug), deterministic, fast enough to run repeatedly, and runnable by you without a human driving a UI. Reach for the cheapest rung that gives you that: a failing test · a curl · a CLI invocation with a saved snapshot · a headless browser script · a replayed captured request · a throwaway harness · a property/fuzz loop · a bisection harness · a differential run against a known-good version.

   No red-capable command, no phase 2. If you catch yourself reading code to build a theory before that command exists, stop and go build it, theorising over a bug you cannot trigger is the single most expensive habit in debugging. This same command is your definition of "fixed." If it still won't reproduce after honest effort: stop: a bug you can't reproduce earns a fix only once it does, and never claim it's fixed. Ship instrumentation instead (logging/assertions at the suspect boundaries) so the next occurrence is diagnosable, state explicitly what you ruled out and how, and hand back with that evidence. "I couldn't reproduce it" is the honest answer, and usually a faster route to the real cause than three speculative patches.

2. Localize. Bisect the space: git bisect across commits, binary-search the code path, add instrumentation/logs at boundaries. Read the actual code and the actual data/state at the failure point rather than theorizing from memory. Narrow to the smallest region that still reproduces.

   Two localization moves that pay for themselves:

   • Diff against a working sibling. Find the closest thing in this codebase that does work, and list every difference: config, imports, call order, environment, without ruling any out as "can't matter". The bug is usually in the difference you dismissed.
   • For multi-component paths (CI → build → deploy, API → service → DB): log what enters and exits each boundary, run the red command once, and read off which hop corrupted it. One instrumented run beats five theories about the middle.
3. Hypothesize. List the credible causes (usually 2–4), ranked. State, for the top one, the exact mechanism: "X happens because Y is Z at line N." Reason from first principles and the runtime model, not from superstition.

4. Test the hypothesis. Prove or kill it with a targeted experiment: inspect the value, toggle the condition, add an assertion. Confirm the mechanism before fixing. If the experiment refutes it, go back to (3) with what you learned. Change one thing at a time. Budget: three refuted hypotheses. Three misses means the framing is wrong, not the ranking: stop generating candidates and widen the search: challenge an assumption you took on faith, distrust the reported symptom, or return to (2) and bisect harder (commits, environment, data) until the region shrinks.

   Three attempted fixes that didn't hold means the architecture is the bug. Not the fourth hypothesis, the frame. When a bug keeps sliding out from under working fixes, you're patching a layer that can't express the invariant: state owned in two places, an ordering nobody guarantees, a boundary that lets the bad value through. Stop fixing and say that. "Three fixes held in isolation and failed in combination: this needs the ownership moved, not another patch" is a finding, and a more valuable one than a fourth attempt.

   The same signals in your own drafting, caught before they cost a cycle: "it's probably X" (a hypothesis skipping its experiment), "quick fix for now, investigate later" (a symptom patch naming itself), "let me try one more thing" (the budget objecting). Each one means: back to the phase you were about to skip.

   Some phrases from your user are the same signal, arriving earlier: "is that not happening?" means you asserted without checking. "stop guessing" means you're proposing fixes without a mechanism. "it's still broken" after a confident fix means the reproduction never covered the real case.

5. Fix the root cause, not the symptom (~/.mastermind/engineering/core/rigor.md). Address why the bad state was possible, ideally make it unrepresentable (types, invariants, a reshaped data structure so the edge case disappears, ~/.mastermind/engineering/core/mindset.md). Never suppress an error to green the check. Before patching a function, search every caller of it. When several share the bug, fix it once, where they all pass through, not at the one caller that reported it.

6. Verify + guard. Confirm the red check now passes and nothing else broke (typecheck/lint/tests/ build). Add the guard that would have caught this: a case in the project's suite if it has one; otherwise an assertion or invariant at the boundary, and offer the test rather than writing it into a repo that has none. The bug must not be able to return silently. Show the evidence.

   Prove the guard guards: with the new test green, revert the fix, the test must go red, then restore. A guard that stays green without the fix is testing something else; thirty seconds here buys the only proof that the regression can't come back unseen.

After

Run levelup (capture) to record the class of bug and its lesson in the active field's lessons.md, so MasterMind doesn't relearn it. Report: root cause, the fix, and the guard added.