What a useful error explanation needs, learned from a 2am stack trace

The author describes debugging a forty-frame Java NullPointerException late at night, noting that a stack trace shows where a failure surfaced rather than where it began. They argue the root cause often sits lower in the trace or in environmental factors the trace never records, such as missing variables or unapplied migrations. They outline four questions a good explanation should answer, with prevention being the one they previously skipped. The piece also introduces LogInSight, a tool that turns pasted traces into plain-English breakdowns, and stresses that its suggested causes are hypotheses drawn only from the text provided. Truncated or interleaved logs should be flagged as incomplete rather than explained with false confidence.