Why every bug goes through a debugging step first

Agents love to patch the symptom. Make them find the cause before they touch the code.

Ask an agent to fix a bug and it will usually fix something. The test goes green, the error goes away, and a week later the same bug shows up somewhere else.

The habit

Before any edit, the agent has to answer three questions in writing:

What exactly fails, and how do I make it fail on demand?
Which callers go through the code I’m about to change?
What is the smallest change that fixes the cause, not the symptom?

If it can’t answer the first one, it isn’t ready to fix anything.

Try it

Before editing, reproduce the bug, list every caller of the function you plan to change, then propose the smallest fix at the root cause.