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Dat Nguyen
Dat Nguyen

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We weren’t slow at fixing bugs — we just didn’t understand them

Most bug reports are useless. So I built this.

I used to think building an AI customer support chatbot would help reduce bugs. The idea was simple: if users could report issues easily through chat, we wouldn’t miss anything.

And at first, it actually worked. We started receiving bug reports faster, fewer things slipped through the cracks, and it felt like real progress.

But after a while, a different problem showed up.

Most of the reports… weren’t very useful. Users would say things like “it’s broken”, “button not working”, or “app doesn’t run”. We knew something was wrong, but we had no idea what they did before, where it happened, or how to reproduce it.

I remember one time our team spent almost 2 hours just trying to understand a single bug before we could even start fixing it. And it wasn’t a rare case.

Even worse, many issues were only reported after users got frustrated and left. By the time we saw the problem, the damage was already done.

That’s when it clicked for me. The problem wasn’t that we were slow at fixing bugs. We just didn’t understand them early enough.

Once I saw that, everything changed. We were already working with AI — chatbots, context handling, trying to understand user intent. So I started wondering: what if we applied the same idea to bugs?

Instead of waiting for users to describe issues (poorly), what if we could capture what actually happened?

So I built a small internal tool. It watches for errors in real time, captures the context around them, and turns that into something developers can actually act on — not just logs, but something closer to a ready-to-fix ticket.

The first time we ran it, it caught bugs before users even noticed them. More importantly, when a bug happened, we didn’t have to guess anymore. We knew what happened.

That’s how Flashlog started.

We’re still building and testing it with early users, improving it based on real-world feedback.

If you’re dealing with similar issues, you can try it here and let me know what you think.

Any feedback, brutal or not, is super valuable at this stage.

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