Omh App Debugging

Catalog Metadata

Category: verification Phase: app-root-cause Hermes role: reviewer Quality tier: root-cause-evidence-gated Reasoning demand: standard

Quality bar:

• State the symptom and the expected behaviour separately from any suspected cause.
• Record the reproduction with its hit rate; an intermittent fault is reproduced when its rate over N runs is measured, not when it happened once.
• Load references/hypothesis-and-race-method.md for the hypothesis table, flaky-test tactics, and race patterns instead of improvising them.
• Pick the next observation by cost and by how many hypotheses its result eliminates, and record the eliminations.
• Keep reproduction, root cause, fix, and verification as separate observed states.

Handoff policy:

Keep the symptom statement, the hypothesis set, the discriminating observations, and the root-cause verdict in Hermes. Record every reproduction run, probe output, and fix verification only from executor or wrapper observed evidence.

Required inputs:

• the wrong behaviour as observed, and the behaviour that was expected
• the command, request, or test that shows it, and how often it shows it
• language, framework, and what changed recently when known
• logs, stack traces, or failing assertions already captured
• observed reproduction and verification evidence for any root-cause or fix claim

Expected outputs:

• reproduction_record/v1
• competing_hypotheses/v1 with at least three hypotheses on distinct axes
• discriminating_observation_plan/v1
• root_cause_record/v1
• fix_handoff/v1 blocked until reproduction_record/v1 reads observed
• observed_fix_verification/v1 when observed

Artifact expectations:

• reproduction_record/v1 names the exact command, the input, the observed output, the expected output, and the hit rate over N runs; it reads observed or not_observed and nothing between
• competing_hypotheses/v1 spans distinct axes -- input and state, ordering and timing, environment and build, dependency behaviour -- rather than three phrasings of one guess
• discriminating_observation_plan/v1 orders the observations cheapest first and names, for each, which hypotheses its result eliminates
• root_cause_record/v1 cites the observation that demonstrated the cause and the one that ruled out each rival
• fix_handoff/v1 carries the reproduction as the regression test that must fail before the fix and pass after it

Safety rules:

• No fix before an observed reproduction: fix_handoff/v1 stays blocked while reproduction_record/v1 reads not_observed, and a proposed change without one is a guess, not a fix.
• Do not claim a reproduction, a probe result, a root cause, or a passing fix from a prepared plan.
• Require at least three hypotheses on distinct axes before planning observations; one hypothesis makes every reading confirmatory.
• Never treat a symptom's disappearance as a root cause; a bug that stops after a print statement, a retry, or a sleep is an open timing fault.
• Do not execute tests, debuggers, or commands from OMH core; the executor runs them and the record takes only what it observed.

Runtime Evidence

Preferred harness for this skill: coding-handling.

omh runtime record --skill app-debugging --harness coding-handling --status started

Record observed delegation results; otherwise return not_available or not_observed. Prepared OMH routing is not execution, review, CI, merge-readiness, or merge evidence.

• Treat wrapper memory/context summaries as advisory local context, not proof of opaque Hermes memory reads or changes. Preserve workflow intent and stop conditions; verify before claiming completion. Reply in the user's own words and the host's own voice: its SOUL.md persona owns reply language, tone, speech level, and sentence endings, progress updates included (where it sets no language, use the one the user wrote in), and OMH shapes structure and content only; OMH's record terms (surface, lane, wrapper, handoff, evidence boundary, not_observed) stay in records and tool calls, never in the sentence the user reads unless they ask about one; and when a stop condition or a decision the user owns ends the turn, offer the next action as a question rather than declaring what will not be done.

Use Hermes-native subagent/delegation features when available: native subagents -> Hermes delegation when available, otherwise sequential lanes.

Shared product, compatibility, topology, memory, harness, and execution rules: omh-routing/references/skill-common-rail.md. Load it when applicable; otherwise name an unavailable capability.