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Stage 4 of the agentic development lifecycle (ADLC) · run with /diagnose.

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What goes in, what you type, what comes out

Diagnose takes the failures that Evaluate flagged and finds why they happened — grounded in your real traces, not guesses — then ranks the fixes. It runs up to five analyzer agents in parallel across slices of your traces; each returns findings tied to specific runs, which Helix merges, de-duplicates, and ranks by expected impact.

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Run it

Point Helix at what’s failing:
Other ways people ask:
  • Run a root cause analysis on the Deep Research agent’s low-scoring runs and rank the fixes worth trying.
  • Find the traces where the Refund Processing agent mis-read the dispute amount and surface the common pattern.

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What you get

  • Root causes, each tied to evidence from your traces.
  • Ranked remedies — the changes most likely to move the verdict, in priority order.
Nothing changes without your approval. In the report’s Decisions tab, pick the remedies you want and copy the result, then paste it into the Helix prompt: that paste is your approval. Helix asks once more (which target, when there are several, then confirm, dry run or cancel) before it writes anything. An approved remedy is applied on a separate branch as a pull request (or as a new revision, for an agent that runs on a cloud platform), never on your current branch. Diagnose applies a remedy once and does not re-check it. To apply a remedy and keep re-checking until your criteria pass, hand it to Optimize instead. Approving a remedy needs a person to pick it in the report and paste the choice back. A headless run (helix -p "/diagnose …") gives you the report; approve from an interactive helix session.

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Use it on its own

You don’t have to run the whole loop to use this stage. Once Helix is installed, point Diagnose at your agent’s traces and it returns evidence-grounded root causes and ranked remedies on its own — no spec, build, or evaluate pass required first.

Next: Optimize

Apply an approved remedy and re-run the loop.