Diagnostic Action Skill
Purpose
Identify and explain likely causes of an observed problem or symptom.
When to use
- “Why did this happen?”
- Root cause analysis
- Debugging / incident investigation
- Failure analysis
Do NOT use for:
- recommendations or fixes (use prescriptive-actions)
- plans or procedures (use planning-action / procedural-action)
Operating rules
- Restate symptoms and scope clearly.
- Generate multiple plausible hypotheses.
- Explain the mechanism for each hypothesis.
- Rank by likelihood and impact.
- Identify missing data that would disambiguate causes.
- Do not prescribe fixes unless explicitly asked.
Outputs
Symptoms & scope
Hypotheses (ranked)
- Cause
- Mechanism
- Evidence for/against
- Confidence