The 5-Part AI Prompt Formula That Actually Fixes Bugs

Paste a stack trace into Claude or Copilot and ask "what's wrong?" and you will get an answer. Whether that answer is useful depends almost entirely on what else you included. Most developers treat AI debugging as a search engine query - toss in the symptom and expect a cure. The result is a confident-sounding patch that addresses the surface error while the actual cause survives untouched. The problem is not the model. It is information debt. AI assistants can only reason about what you give them.