A Question, Asked Precisely

A support ticket that reads “the app is broken” is a request for help. A ticket that reads “the checkout service returns a 500 only on Tuesdays, only when the cart payload exceeds two megabytes, and only after the nightly cron job has run” is something else. The second is not a better-worded version of the first. It is most of a diagnosis. By the time you have stated the failure precisely enough to file it, there is almost nothing left to do — the bug, cornered by its own description, has nowhere left to hide. That is the truth inside a tempting aphorism — that a question asked with enough precision answers itself. The aphorism is worth keeping, but not in that form, because in that form it is either empty or false. The work of rescuing it is where it gets interesting, because what survives turns out to be a claim not about precision but about what questions are. Take “enough” at its word and the trap springs immediately. If “enough precision” just means the precision at which the…