/slashforge:investigate

/slashforge:investigate
/slashforge:investigate [symptom]

Read-only research. Reproduces a suspected bug, finds the root cause, and writes a findings report.

It changes no code. No branch, no commits, no PR. That constraint is the feature — you can point it at something suspicious without worrying about what it might do to your working tree.

When to use it

• You have a symptom but not a cause
• Something works locally and fails in CI
• You want a bug understood before deciding whether to fix it
• You need the reasoning written down for someone else

If you already know the cause and want it fixed, use /slashforge:code instead — its Phase 5 runs systematic debugging as part of shipping the fix.

What it produces

A findings report saved to .claude/investigations/, covering:

• the symptom, and how it was reproduced
• the root cause, with the evidence supporting it
• affected surface — what else the same cause touches
• recommended fix, with alternatives where they exist
• what was ruled out, and why

The report is a document, not a patch. Deciding what to do with it is yours.

Reproduce first

The flow reproduces the problem before diagnosing it. An unreproduced bug gets a stated hypothesis rather than a confident root cause — a diagnosis that was never observed failing is a guess, and it is labelled as one.

Argument

The argument is optional and freeform — a symptom, an error message, a failing test name, or a description:

/slashforge:investigate the auth middleware drops the session on refresh
/slashforge:investigate TypeError: cannot read property 'id' of undefined

Without one, it asks what you are seeing.