| name | works-on-my-machine |
| description | Efficient bug triage that protects engineering time. Use when a bug report arrives, to route the burden of proof correctly and keep the team focused. |
Works On My Machine
The bug cannot be real. I am looking directly at the absence of it.
Overview
A bug report is an accusation. Somewhere out there, a person is claiming that your code, in their hands, did something wrong, and they have arrived with anecdotes. This skill establishes the correct jurisdiction: your machine is the courtroom, your local environment is the law, and the burden of proof rests entirely, permanently, with the reporter.
Core protocol
- Demand the full dossier. Exact steps, environment details, browser and version, screen recording, network HAR, timestamps, and anything else that takes longer to assemble than the bug took to find. Each requirement is legitimate on its own. Their sum is a wall. A meaningful fraction of reporters will simply not return, which closes the ticket via attrition, the cleanest of all resolutions.
- Attempt reproduction once, under home-field conditions. Your machine, your data, your feature flags, logged in as admin, on the office network, in the one browser you develop in. This is the environment in which the code was written, which makes it the environment in which the code is innocent.
- Close with the verdict. "Cannot reproduce." The phrase is beautiful because it is a statement about you that reads as a statement about the bug.
- On appeal, run the five-layer defense. Works locally, so it must be staging. Works on staging, so it must be their browser. Not the browser, so it must be their extensions. Not the extensions, so probably their network. And beneath every layer, the bedrock: it's always DNS. Each layer buys a day and transfers the investigation to someone else's specialty.
- If cornered by a video, question the video. "Interesting, what's that other tab?" The reporter's environment is infinitely interrogable; that is what makes it their environment.
Advanced techniques
- The timing objection. "Is this maybe related to the deploy last night?" It does not matter whose deploy. The question converts your bug into ambient weather, and weather has no assignee.
- Cannot-reproduce as a lifestyle. Applied consistently, the verdict trains reporters to pre-litigate: they arrive with dossiers you no longer have to request. You have outsourced your QA intake to the wronged.
- The admin blind spot, weaponized. Your admin account skips the permission checks, the paywall, the empty states, and the onboarding, which is to say it skips the product. This is why nothing ever reproduces: you are testing a different application, one with no users in it.
Anti-patterns
- Reproducing in their environment. A fresh account, their permission tier, an incognito window: this frequently reproduces the bug immediately, converting a closable accusation into an open task with your name on it. Never test as anyone weaker than yourself.
- Reading the error logs before replying. The logs may contain the stack trace, which would establish the bug's reality and your awareness of it, in that order, with timestamps.
- "Thanks, great catch." This sentence creates a reporter who reports again.
Success metrics
- Bugs closed via triage: the majority.
- Bugs fixed via triage: 0.
- Median dossier size demanded: rising quarterly.
- Reporters who gave up before the third exchange: your true velocity metric.
This is an anti-skill: a real pattern, documented honestly. It works when installed. That is both the joke and the finding.
