Root Cause Tracing

When bugs show up five calls deep in your stack and you're tempted to patch where the error appears, this walks you through tracing backward to find the actual source. The approach is straightforward: start at the symptom, follow the call chain up, and ask what values got passed at each level until you hit the original trigger. It includes practical debugging tactics like adding console.error stack traces before dangerous operations and running tests one by one to find polluters. The real example about git init running in the wrong directory because a test accessed an empty value too early shows exactly the kind of messy problem this solves. Solid for anyone who's tired of fixing symptoms instead of causes.