diagnose-before-patching

name	diagnose-before-patching
description	Use when something is broken or failing and the cause must be found before changing it. Owns failure diagnosis only.
category	core
source_group	hermes-operational
compatibility	opencode

When To Use

Load this only when something is broken, failing, regressing, contradictory, or behaving differently from the stated expectation. The skill owns cause-finding before repair.

Use it for build failures, runtime errors, test regressions, bad outputs, broken prompts, unreliable workflows, or operational symptoms where a patch would otherwise be a guess.

Do Not Use

Do not use this for ordinary pre-solution inspection, stylistic refinement, packaging a decision, simplifying a design, or proving a completed fix. If there is no failure state or symptom, this skill is too heavy.

What To Do

• State the observed failure and the expected behavior in concrete terms.
• Reproduce or localize the symptom before changing anything when feasible.
• Trace from symptom to likely cause using the smallest useful evidence: logs, tests, diffs, inputs, config, or runtime behavior.
• Change only what the cause explains. Avoid broad rewrites that merely pass near the symptom.
• If the cause remains uncertain, label the patch as provisional and keep the next check narrow.

Output Shape

Return the failure, evidence, likely cause, minimal patch, and the targeted check that would prove the cause was addressed.