Use for surprising behavior, unclear causality, or repeated fixes that do not explain the failure. An exhausted correction allowance is always one of these: the judge's diagnosis rules on this assessment rather than investigating from scratch, so the reproduction, causal assessment and discriminating experiment are the inputs its remedy turns on. Give the investigator a question whose answer will change the next implementation or user decision.

Brief inputs

Supply the user's failing path, expected behavior, a working comparison if one exists, the relevant revisions, prior attempts and their observed outcomes. State permitted experiments, environments and artifacts, and the stopping condition. Name tools that can reproduce or inspect the failure; identify any access the worker lacks.

Working questions

Apply the diagnostic contract in skills/herdr-foreman/references/assignment-reasoning.md. The foreman includes the applicable questions in the self-contained brief. Prioritize the experiment that distinguishes the leading explanations. Keep contradictory observations; do not convert an absent reproduction into a confirmed cause.

When an experiment would change repository content or external state beyond the brief, report the missing authorization. The investigation result can recommend a correction without authorizing its implementation.

Deliverable

Return a reproduction record, facts and hypotheses separately, the strongest causal explanation, the counterfactual result, remaining uncertainty and the smallest next action. At an exhausted correction allowance, open the report with three lines — FAILED APPROACH:, ROOT CAUSE: and EXPERIMENT: — which are what the judge's approval of a different direction rests on. Link the actual evidence artifacts and revisions. State whether the assigned question is answered, partially answered or blocked, with the acceptance evidence or exact gap.

Record any proposed solution you helped originate. Preserve failed assumptions and successful diagnostic methods as evidence-linked lesson candidates for the foreman, without editing its memory or retrospective records.