What does your assistant still ask you for? #148

stacktale exists because of one observation: you paste a stack trace to an assistant and it spends the next five messages asking you for things that existed at the moment of the error and were thrown away. The report is an attempt to put those things in the block up front — the log lines that led to the failure, the values, the environment, which frame is yours.

It doesn't get everything. So: what does your assistant still ask you for?

Concretely — the last time you debugged a Java error with an AI, what was the follow-up question that made you go dig? A few I've seen:

• "What was the value of X at that point?" — we capture method arguments at the throw site only with the optional -javaagent, and nothing about the receiver's own state.
• "Can you show me the code around that line?" — deliberately not in the file (it's gitignored, redacted and token-budgeted), but the MCP server could serve it from your workspace. That's #138.
• "Is this new?" — a report can tell you an error happened on build 7e3c1f. It cannot tell you whether it started there. That's #137.
• "Can you write a test that reproduces it?" — the research is fairly emphatic that a reproduction is the single most valuable thing you can hand a debugging agent, and we're standing at the throw site holding most of what one needs. That's #135.

I'd rather build from what people actually hit than from what I can imagine. If you've got a case where the report wasn't enough — even a vague memory of one — that's useful. A pasted errors-ai.log block with a note about what was missing is even better.

Answers here have a decent chance of becoming issues.