AI assistants fix the crashing line, not the system state that keeps producing it
ClickOk5811 · reddit · 2026-09-13
A Reddit essay analyzes a structural blind spot of AI coding assistants: given a stack trace, the most locally justified answer is a fix that stops the crashing line — a different question from 'why does my system produce this state at all'.
- Recognizable failure pattern: the same underlying issue gets fixed multiple times at different call sites, each fix correct for what it was shown, none touching the upstream logic (often several files away) that keeps producing the state
- Not a criticism of the tooling — it efficiently answers the question actually asked; the gap is that 'stop this error' and 'fix this bug' get treated as the same request
- The tell: ask whether the fix would still hold if the input changed slightly, or would just relocate the same failure
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