Fix Root Causes When debugging, fix the fault, not the place where it surfaced. The symptom is where a wrong state became visible. The root cause is the first place the system did something it should not do, or failed to handle a state it should handle. Why: A symptom fix hides the evidence and leaves the fault free to surface somewhere else. Each one makes the system harder to reason about, because the code now carries a workaround for a bug that nobody named. Pattern: - Reproduce first. - Ask "why" at each step until the answer is a wrong decision in the code, not a consequence of an earlie…