Decide if a bug is worth a real fix or a quick patch
Patching the symptom and fixing the root cause are both valid — the wrong choice for a given bug is the expensive mistake.
- Use it for
- Anyone triaging a bug who needs to decide between a fast patch and a proper root-cause fix.
Every bug triage decision is implicitly choosing between patching the immediate symptom and fixing the underlying cause, but that choice often gets made by default — patch under time pressure, real fix when there's slack — rather than by what the specific bug actually needs. Patching a bug that will keep recurring wastes more time overall than the real fix would have, while over-engineering a fix for a genuine one-off wastes time the other direction. This prompt checks which situation this bug actually is.
When not to use this
If the bug is trivially simple with an obvious real fix that's no slower than a patch, there's no real tradeoff to think through — just fix it properly.
Did this work?
You have a specific reason for choosing a patch or a real fix, tied to how likely the bug is to recur and what a patch would leave unaddressed, not just which one is faster to ship right now.
Tested on claude-opus-5. Evidence status is draft; it moves to battle-tested only on recorded runs, never by hand.