Vibe Debugging Journal

vibe-debugging-journal

Bugs come in patterns. Recording them prevents re-investigation.

When to Use This Skill

• After resolving a non-trivial bug (took >10 minutes to find)
• After finding a bug that was hard to reproduce
• After debugging something where the root cause was surprising
• When you notice a bug pattern repeating

When NOT to Use This Skill

• Trivial bugs (typos, missing imports)
• Bugs with immediately obvious causes
• Build/configuration issues (not really bugs)

Steps

1. Categorize the bug:

   • Concurrency (race conditions, deadlocks, ordering)
   • State Management (stale state, missing updates, cache invalidation)
   • Type/Validation (type errors, missing validation, edge cases)
   • Integration (API mismatch, version incompatibility, protocol errors)
   • Environment (platform-specific, config, deployment)
   • UI/Rendering (layout, hooks, lifecycle)

2. Record in structured format:

### [Category]: [Short description]
**Date**: [date]
**Symptom**: [What was observed]
**Root Cause**: [The actual problem]
**Why Hard to Find**: [What made debugging difficult]
**Fix**: [What was changed]
**Prevention**: [How to prevent recurrence]
**Files**: [affected files]

3. Save to persistent storage:

   • Project: docs/debugging-journal.md or DEBUGGING.md
   • Memory: Claude auto-memory or MCP

4. Cross-reference — If this relates to an existing journal entry, link them

Output Format

Present the entry for user confirmation, then save. Keep entries concise (5-10 lines each).