| name | Investigate before implementing |
| description | Engineered, not rushed -- profile and understand the system before changing it, find root cause not symptoms, then implement deliberately. Use for any non-trivial fix or feature where the right design is not obvious. |
| when | a non-trivial bug, performance issue, or feature where you do not yet know the root cause or the right design |
| tags | workflow, core, quality |
Investigate before implementing
Symphonee work is "engineered not rushed, planned not on-the-go, and documented".
This skill is how you earn that: understand first, change second.
Use when
- A bug whose cause is not yet known, or a "it feels slow / it flickers" report.
- A feature where the architecture or the right insertion point is unclear.
- Anything you would otherwise be tempted to fix by guessing.
Do not use when
- The fix is obvious and localized (a typo, a known one-liner) -- just do it.
- The user explicitly asked for a quick patch and accepted the trade-off.
Steps (primary path)
- Reproduce / locate: find the exact files and lines involved before theorizing.
Prefer the dedicated search tools over shelling out.
- Find the ROOT cause, not the symptom. Trace the data/control flow to where the
problem originates (e.g. a release that fires before the work it gates, a
wrapper object stringified instead of its
.text). Symptoms lie; flows do not.
- Check what already exists: Mind (
/api/mind/query for structure,
/api/mind/recall for prior work), the relevant skills, plugins, and existing
helpers. Do not re-solve what is already solved.
- Decide the design deliberately. If there are real trade-offs the user owns,
surface them; otherwise pick the obvious option and say which.
- Only now implement -- via the
ship-a-change skill.
Safety
- Do not change behavior you do not understand; if a finding contradicts how
something was described, surface it instead of plowing ahead.
- Measure before optimizing -- profiling beats guessing.
Verification
- You can state the root cause in one sentence and point to the file:line.
- The fix addresses that cause, not a downstream symptom.
- You checked Mind/skills/plugins so you did not duplicate existing work.
