Hmbown Investigation
Follow evidence through a system until the hidden mechanism becomes legible.
What This Skill Does
Use this skill when a problem has clues, but they need to be connected into a causal explanation. In this grimoire, Investigation is treated as a metaphorical skill with a shipping-now delivery profile. Canonical reference input: Investigation (skill).
When To Use
- You are debugging a failure, regression, or strange behavior.
- There are logs, traces, docs, or code clues that need synthesis.
- You need the why, not just the what.
Prerequisites
- No extra runtime dependencies beyond Hermes Agent and the normal toolset for this session.
Procedure
- Restate the target, the success condition, and any no-touch boundaries before taking action.
- Collect the strongest observable clues first.
- Test causal hypotheses against code, data, logs, or configuration.
- Eliminate weak explanations and keep the chain of reasoning tight.
- Return the most defensible explanation plus the next decisive check.
- Package the result as the deliverables below, with confidence, assumptions, and unresolved risk called out explicitly.
Deliverables
- A ranked set of causes with evidence.
- The most likely root cause.
- A next-step validation or fix path.
Pitfalls / Guardrails
- Keep the metaphor anchored to a real mechanism instead of drifting into lore.
- Do not confuse correlation with cause.
- Keep evidence and inference visibly separate.
Verification
- Check that the result includes every deliverable promised above.
- Check that confirmed facts, assumptions, and inferences are visibly separated.
- Check that the metaphor still maps cleanly to a real operational mechanism.
Example Invocation
/investigation follow the clues here and tell me the most likely root cause with evidence