When a fix goes in without understanding why the bug occurred, the symptom disappears but the cause lingers. It will return under a different shape, or the "fix" will mask a more serious problem upstream.
Symptoms
Fix adds a null check without explaining why the value was null.
Retry loop wrapped around a flaky call with no investigation into why it was failing.
Try/except swallowing a specific exception without stating what conditions produce it.
Condition tweaked (> β >=) to make a test pass, with no explanation of the underlying off-by-one.
PR description says "fix X" with no "because Y".
What to do
Before proposing a fix, write one sentence stating the root cause. If you can't, you don't understand the bug well enough to fix it.
Explain how the symptom follows from the cause β the chain of events from "bad thing happened" to "user saw this".
Confirm the fix addresses the cause, not just the symptom. A null check is valid only if you know why the value was null and concluded that null is acceptable.
Where the cause is upstream, fix it upstream. Only patch downstream if upstream is genuinely out of reach, and say so.
Leave a comment linking the symptom to the cause so future readers don't misread the fix as superficial.
