When you paste an error into an AI agent, you're handing it your conclusion

Pasting error stack traces into AI agents often provides a conclusion rather than the root cause, leading to superficial fixes that fail in production. Error text represents symptoms, which are less useful to agents lacking full system context. Simultaneously, determining when an AI agent should stop is a critical challenge. Stopping too early misses evidence, while continuing too long increases costs, wastes time, or degrades the quality of a previously correct answer during incident investigations.