How a User Helped Fixing 4 Bugs with AI (and No Expertise)

Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs that don't know ANYTHING about our stack, but are great AI drivers and producing some high quality issue reports.

This person (linked below) was experiencing Ghostty crashes and took it upon themselves to use AI to write a python script that can decode our crash files, match them up with our dsym files, and analyze the codebase for attempting to find the root cause, and extracted that into an Agent Skill.

They then came into Discord, warned us they don't know Zig at all, don't know macOS dev at all, don't know terminals at all, and that they used AI, but that they thought critically about the issues and believed they were real and asked if we'd accept them. I took a look at one, was impressed, and said send them all.

This fixed 4 real crashing cases that I was able to manually verify and write a fix for from someone who — on paper — had no fucking clue what they were talking about. And yet, they drove an AI with expert skill.

I want to call out that in addition to driving AI with expert skill, they navigated the terrain with expert skill as well. They didn't just toss slop up on our repo. They came to Discord as a human, reached out as a human, and talked to other humans about what they've done. They were careful and thoughtful about the process.

People like this give me hope for what is possible. But it really, really depends on high quality people like this. Most today — to continue the analogy — are unfortunately driving like a teenager who has only driven toy go-karts.

Examples: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions?discussions_q=is%3Aclosed+crash+author%3A0xBigBoss