Root Cause Tracing

When you're staring at an error five layers deep in the call stack, your first instinct is to patch it where it breaks. This skill teaches you to resist that urge and trace backward to find the actual source. It's designed for those frustrating bugs where git init runs in the wrong directory or a file gets created somewhere unexpected because bad data got passed down through multiple function calls. Part of a larger systematic debugging workflow, this focuses specifically on Phase 1 root cause investigation. The approach is simple but disciplined: follow the chain back until you find where things first went wrong, then fix it there instead of bandaging symptoms downstream.