bug-hunt
A correctness sweep that only reports bugs it failed to refute. Finders generate candidates; verifiers try to kill them; survivors make the report. The single biggest failure mode of agent bug-hunting is plausible-but-wrong findings, so verification is not optional.
Read-only. Finding bugs and fixing them are separate engagements.
Lenses
Sweep with each lens. With parallel subagents available, one finder per lens; otherwise sequential passes.
| Lens | Hunting for |
|---|---|
| Logic | Inverted conditions, off-by-one, wrong operator, unreachable branches, broken invariants |
| Error handling | Swallowed exceptions, missing error paths, errors that corrupt state before propagating, misleading messages |
| Edge cases | Empty/nil/zero inputs, unicode, huge inputs, boundary values, first/last iteration |
| Concurrency | Races, missing locks, shared mutable state, TOCTOU, async ordering assumptions |
| API misuse | Contract violations against libraries and the project's own interfaces, ignored return values, resource leaks, lifecycle errors |
Focus finders on code that is reachable and load-bearing: entry points, hot paths, recently changed files (git log --since is a good prior). A bug in dead code is info, not a finding.
Two deep lenses live as their own skills: latent-premises for unguarded assumptions that hold today with no trigger yet, and retry-safety for side effects that double-apply on a re-run. Reach for them when the sweep keeps surfacing "could break later" candidates that fail the trigger rule.
Verification (mandatory)
Every candidate gets an adversarial pass before it may appear in the report. The verifier's job is to REFUTE the finding, default skeptical:
- Read the actual code path end to end, including callers and guards the finder may have missed.
- Trace a concrete input that triggers the bug. No trigger, no bug.
- Check whether a test, type system, or runtime check already prevents it.
- Verdict: confirmed (with the triggering scenario), refuted (drop silently), or unverifiable (report downgraded one severity, marked
(unverified)).
When tests can be run safely (no external dependencies, sandboxed), a failing reproduction test is the gold standard for confirmation and should be included in the finding as a sketch, not committed.
Report contract
Same spine as line-check so findings compose. Severity: critical (data loss, corruption, security-adjacent) / high (wrong results on common inputs, crashes) / medium (wrong on edge cases) / low (latent, needs unlikely conditions) / info. Effort is the fix cost: S / M / L.
markdown# bug-hunt report: <repo> (<date>) ## Verdict Paragraph: overall correctness posture, the scariest confirmed bug. ## Scorecard | Lens | Score (0-5) | Summary | ## Findings ### [SEVERITY] Short imperative title - **Lens:** which lens found it - **Where:** file:line - **What:** the defect, concretely - **Trigger:** the concrete input or sequence that hits it - **Why it matters:** consequence - **Fix:** specific action - **Effort:** S / M / L ## Backlog Numbered, leverage-sorted: `N. [SEVERITY/EFFORT] title (lens)` ## Not checked Lenses or areas skipped and why; candidates that were refuted (count only).
Common mistakes
- Reporting finder output without verification. Half of plausible candidates die under a skeptical read.
- "This could be a problem if..." findings with no trigger. A bug without a triggering input is a hypothesis.
- Treating style issues as bugs. Wrong formatting never corrupted data.
- Stopping at the first confirmed bug in a file. Bugs cluster; finish the file.
