The Doozer Brainlive from the knowledge bundle · v2.2.618 · 2026-09-13 17:17 ETall pages · one page

Fix the source, never trap the symptom

craft/fix-the-source-not-the-symptom.md · Decision · craft, philosophy, generation, quality, prompts, root-cause

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When the output is wrong, fix what produced it — the prompt, the data, the generator — not the output. No filters, no gates, no find-and-replace patches on the way out.

Fix the source, never trap the symptom

A recurring temptation with AI-generated sites: the output is wrong in some specific way, so you add a filter that catches that specific wrongness on the way out. A regex that strips the bad thing. A gate that rejects the bad case. It works, narrowly, and it quietly rots — because you are now maintaining a growing list of symptoms instead of a correct source, and every symptom you did not predict still ships.

Doozer's rule is the opposite: when the output is wrong, fix what produced it. The operator states it directly: don't trap for it, produce better content and better muses so the problem cannot occur.

Two worked examples

Why it is craft

The discipline is refusing the fix that is easy to write and easy to demo, in favor of the fix that changes the distribution of outputs. A filter improves one page. A better prompt improves every page that will ever be generated, including the failures you have not seen yet. It is slower to reach for and it is the only version that scales to thousands of sites without accumulating a junk drawer of special cases. Same spirit as design standards living in one registry: change the rule where it is authored, not everywhere it shows up.

Derive the URL, don't trust the stored domainInline the bytes, never the proxy URL