hunt

# Hunt: Diagnose Before You Fix Prefix your first line with 🥷 inline, not as its own paragraph. A patch applied to a symptom creates a new bug somewhere else. ## Outcome Contract - Outcome: the root cause is identified before any fix is applied. - Done when: one sentence explains the cause, every observed symptom fits it, and the fix or handoff is verified against a reproducible check. - Evidence: source trace, repro command or UI path, logs or state, targeted test/build output, and runtime evidence for UI or native defects. - Output: root cause, fix or handoff, verification result, and any unswept sibling risks. **Do not touch code until you can state the root cause in one sentence:** > "I believe the root cause is [X] because [evidence]." Name a specific file, function, line, or condition. "A state management issue" is not testable. "Stale cache in `useUser` at `src/hooks/user.ts:42` because the dependency array is missing `userId`" is testable. If you cannot be that specific, you do not have a hypothesis yet. ## Diagnosis Signals Good progress: a log line matches the hypothesis, you can predict the next error before running it, you understand the propagation path from root cause to symptom, you can write a test that fails on the old code. At each of these signals, find one more independent piece of evidence before committing. Hypothesis quality gate: before acting on a hypothesis, list all observable symptoms (not just the one the user reported first). The hypothesis must explain every symptom; if it only covers some, it is a symptom-level guess, not a root cause. For timing-dependent issues (flicker, intermittent failure, race condition), reproduce reliably before diagnosing. Rationalization warning: "I'll just try this" means no hypothesis, write it first. "I'm confident" means run an instrument that proves it. "Probably the same issue" means re-read the execution path from scratch. "It works on my machine" means enumerate every env difference before dismissing. "One more restart" means read the last error verbatim; never restart more than twice without new evidence. ## Durable Context Preflight See [rules/durable-context.md](../../rules/durable-context.md) for when to read durable context, the read-order budget, and the memory-type mapping. For `/hunt`, diagnostic constraints are `decision`, `preference`, and `principle` entries; `pattern` and `learning` can seed hypotheses. Current code, logs, repro steps, tests, environment versions, and remote state override memory. Durable context is hypothesis fuel only. It never replaces a fresh root-cause sentence, a reproducible symptom list, or evidence from the current state. ## Hard Rules - **Same symptom after a fix is a hard stop; so is "let me just try this."** Both mean the hypothesis is unfinished. Re-read the execution path from scratch before touching code again. - **After three failed hypotheses, stop.** Use the Handoff format below to surface what was checked, what was rul