Investigation scratchpad

Copy this for every exercise. The point is to get state out of your head and onto the page, so working memory is spent on the problem rather than on holding the problem.

Fill it in as you go, not afterwards.

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1. Ticket

• Customer symptom:
• Affected scope:
• Urgency:

2. Prediction

Write this before you run anything. Being wrong here is useful data.

• Target layer:
• Expected output:
• Likely cause A:
• Likely cause B:

3. Evidence

• Command or query:
• Why this is safe to run:

4. Read the output

• Observed output:
• Confirmed:
• Disproven:
• Still unknown:

The third and fourth lines are the ones people skip. Separating what you proved from what you suspect is the entire discipline.

5. What does it prove?

• Proof sentence:
• Safe next step:
• Alternate hypothesis:

6. Wording

• Customer update:
• Engineering escalation notes:

7. Recall

• Command to repeat tomorrow:
• Mistake or gap:
• First action next time: