Simon Willison · · 1 min read

Quoting Armin Ronacher

Mirrored from Simon Willison for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.

24th May 2026

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so badly that the conclusions produced are more often than not inaccurate but always full of confidence. The result is complete guesswork on root causes, fake-minimal repros, suggested implementation strategies, analogies to adjacent but often the wrong code, and long lists of error classes that might or might not matter. [...]

So at least personally, I increasingly want issue reports to be condensed to what the human actually observed:

  1. I ran this command.
  2. I expected this to happen.
  3. This happened instead.
  4. Here is the exact error or log.

Armin Ronacher, on slop issues filed against Pi

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