1 min lesson
The first triage question
Imagine this comes up at work: "Several users report Cursor's chat 'hanging' with no response, all starting around the same hour. Which layer do you suspect first and why?" Start with the practical move.
Step 1 of 2
The first triage questionclient, server or model?
Before any deep dive, sort the bug into one of three buckets. Each carries different evidence and routes to a different team.
Lives on the user's machine: editor, extension, index, local config.
Evidence: Developer Tools console, output logs, repros on a clean profile.
Often one user or one environment.
Lives in transport or the backend: timeouts, 5xx, rate limits, outages.
Evidence: network capture, status codes, server traces if you're given them.
Usually many users at once, correlated in time.
Prompt and plumbing are fine; the model's output is wrong.
Evidence: the prompt, retrieved context and rates across many runs.
Nondeterministic - judge by frequency, not one bad answer.
One user usually means local config, an extension, the index or that machine's network. A spike across many users at the same moment points at a server-side change, a model regression or a release. Ask "how many, since when?" before you ask "why" - the answer reroutes the whole investigation.