Success and failure deserve a shape that both people and AI can read

July 19, 2026

Overview

I’m sure you’ve come across a log line or an exception that just said something like “an error occurred,” with no real context attached. It’s frustrating, and it usually means the debugging session is about to take twice as long as it should.

Here is what I kept running into, across different jobs and different codebases.

Problem	Description
Exceptions are inconsistent	Some get thrown for outcomes you expect, some for genuine bugs, and you usually cannot tell which just by reading a function signature.
Booleans tell you almost nothing	success: Boolean answers one question and skips the one you actually needed.
HTTP codes leak everywhere	They show up in background jobs and CLI commands that have nothing to do with HTTP, mostly because there was nothing better around.

None of these three things talk to each other. None of them compose. I think most of us just get used to the friction and stop noticing it, until a debugging session drags on and you realize you still don’t actually know what happened, only that something didn’t go as planned.

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