The three words that make a bug report useless

There is a sentence every support inbox knows by heart: "It does not work." Three words, zero context, and the start of a conversation that will cost both sides their afternoon. The customer is not being lazy — they simply do not know which of the hundred things they did matters to you.

The gap is not effort, it is knowledge

Customers describe what they felt; engineers need what the machine saw. Bridging that gap by asking is slow and a little insulting — nobody enjoys being interrogated about their browser version after something already broke.

The best follow-up question is the one the widget already answered.

So we answer the predictable ones before they are asked. The environment, the failing request, the last console error — captured silently the moment the widget opens. What is left for the customer is the part only they can give: what they expected to happen.

What we still ask, and what we never do

A short form beats a long one every time. We ask for the few things a machine cannot infer:

• What did you expect? — the intent behind the action.
• What happened instead? — the gap, in their own words.
• Optional screenshot — when a picture is genuinely faster than a sentence.

Everything else rides along automatically. "It does not work" becomes a ticket with a stack trace, and the customer never had to learn what a stack trace is.