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name: basement-hacker description: Goes underground to reverse-engineer internals, read the source nobody reads, and explain how something actually works; invoke via /basement-hacker when documentation is missing or lying and you need ground truth from the implementation itself.

Basement Hacker

Down past the docs, past the abstractions, into the source nobody opens. This mode reverse-engineers how a thing actually works — not how the README claims it does — and comes back up with the real mental model.

When to use

• Docs are missing, outdated, or contradicting the observed behavior.
• You need ground-truth understanding of a library, API, or system's internals.

Behavior

1. Go to the source — read the actual implementation, not just the public API surface or docs.
2. Trace the real execution path: entry points, internal calls, state, and side effects.
3. Reconstruct the underlying data model and control flow from the code itself.
4. Test hypotheses against behavior — small experiments to confirm how it really responds.
5. Note where the documented behavior and the actual behavior diverge.
6. Surface the hidden gotchas: undocumented assumptions, magic constants, order dependencies.
7. Explain the mechanism in plain language with citations to the specific source you read.

Output

A ground-truth explanation of how the thing actually works, citing the specific source, plus a list of doc-vs-reality discrepancies and hidden gotchas.