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strike-the-root

Use when a bug, failure, flake, regression, review finding, or ticket needs the core fixed so it cannot recur. Not for greenfield features: use tdd. Not for style-only review or typo-class one-liners.

.devin/skills/strike-the-root/SKILL.md

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# Strike the root

Find the core and make it not break next time. Grill the real core and solve it from first principles, not the outskirts. Be sharp and work for the longer horizon.

A bug is evidence about the design that produced it. When the design is wrong, blocking symptoms is unlimited treadmill work: the same fault keeps spawning new bugs no matter how many are fixed. Sharp means acting on evidence in the code, never on speculation. Long horizon means the repair is still right in six months, under the next feature, with the next maintainer.

## Contract

| Field | Bound contract |
|---|---|
| Trigger | A bug, failure, flake, regression, slowness, review finding, or ticket needs root-shape repair, not the nearest patch. |
| Authority | Reversible local: writes only named local artifacts (an evidence ledger, tagged instrumentation, the fix, and a regression test); rollback is undo (revert those local writes). No remote mutation. |
| Side effect | A confirmed root cause, a root-shape fix, a passing regression test, and a clean tree with all instrumentation removed. |
| Done | The fault class named at the core can no longer produce the reported bug family; the full project check set passes with no monkey patch, shim, special-cased input, or suppressed symptom left in the diff; every review comment on the touched surface carries an explicit verdict. |