gh-dhruvbaldawa-ccconfigs-essentials/skills/debugging/reference/antipatterns.md

Debugging Antipatterns (and Recoveries)

Avoid these documented failure modes; use the recovery steps when detected.

1) Circular Reasoning Without Learning

• Symptom: Proposing the same fix repeatedly
• Recovery: Stop and use SequentialThinking:process_thought to analyze why the fix failed; propose a substantively different approach

2) Premature Victory Declaration

• Symptom: Declaring success without changes/tests
• Recovery: Show changed lines; run tests that fail-before/pass-after; verify across scenarios

3) Pattern Amnesia

• Symptom: Ignoring established code patterns/conventions
• Recovery: codebase_search similar implementations; extract and follow patterns; explain any deviation

4) Implementation Before Understanding

• Symptom: Jumping to code edits without examining context
• Recovery: Explore → Plan → Code; read relevant files; outline plan; then implement

5) Context-Limited Fixes

• Symptom: Fixing one location only
• Recovery: Search project-wide (grep/codebase_search) for the root pattern; patch all occurrences; refactor if repeated

6) Symptom Chasing

• Symptom: Treating error messages as the problem
• Recovery: Apply 5 Whys; confirm root cause explains all symptoms; then fix

7) Assumption-Based Debugging

• Symptom: Assuming library/system behavior
• Recovery: Research via Firecrawl:search; verify with Context7:get-library-docs; test assumptions

8) Context Overload Ignorance

• Symptom: Degraded reasoning in long sessions
• Recovery: Restart at ~50%; carry summary of facts, hypothesis, next step only

9) Tool Misuse

• Symptom: Using wrong tool for task
• Recovery: Decision tree: exact text→grep; concept→codebase_search; full context→read_file; research→Firecrawl/Perplexity; complex analysis→SequentialThinking

10) Plan Abandonment

• Symptom: Ignoring the plan mid-way
• Recovery: Note deviation; justify; update plan; resume at correct step