The core mindset

The single biggest mistake beginners make is pasting "it doesn't work, fix it" into the chat and hoping. The AI cannot see your screen, your data, or what you expected to happen. It only knows what you tell it. When you give it nothing, it does the only thing it can: it guesses — and a confident guess that happens to be wrong is more dangerous than no answer at all, because you'll act on it. Debugging with AI is mostly about feeding it the right context so it can reason instead of guess.

A good bug report — to a human or an AI — answers three questions:

• What did you do? (the steps to trigger it)
• What did you expect to happen?
• What actually happened? (the error, the wrong output, the crash)

If you can answer those three, you are already ahead of most people. The reason these three matter is that a bug is, by definition, a gap between what you expected and what occurred. The AI cannot find a gap it cannot see both sides of. "It's broken" describes only one side; "I expected a welcome screen, I got a blank page and this error" describes both — and the gap practically names itself.