Error Reporting

Treating all failure types as a generic 'something went wrong' collapses diagnostic information and forces everyone downstream to start from zero. A bare HTTP 500 response fails to distinguish between a crashed critical system and a user entering an invalid form value, despite these scenarios having entirely different urgencies and owners. Generic, non-descriptive error messages cause real operational damage across every role in software development and support. Error messages should be written as if the reader has no prior context. An error message must describe what happened with enough context to distinguish it from other possible failures, including which file, in which context, and under what circumstances.