Debug production issues with AI agents

Agents are strongest at debugging when they're forced to be systematic: reproduce, isolate, hypothesize, verify. Left unprompted they guess-and-check like a junior at 2am. The fix is encoding the discipline as a skill the agent must follow.

THE PAIN

• ✗ Agents propose fixes before understanding the bug
• ✗ Context evaporates between debugging sessions
• ✗ The same class of bug recurs because nothing was written down

THE PLAYBOOK

1. 01

   Force reproduction first

   The skill's hard gate: no fix proposals until the failure reproduces in a minimal case.

2. 02

   Isolate with bisection

   Have the agent binary-search commits, inputs, or config until the trigger is pinned.

3. 03

   One hypothesis at a time

   Each hypothesis gets a falsifiable test before any code changes. The agent logs what it ruled out.

4. 04

   Write the post-mortem

   The agent ends by appending the root cause and fix to a debugging journal — future sessions read it first.