The instructions mark exactly two steps REQUIRED, and the two markers
sucker looks for are those two steps. So a failure can say which one is
missing — the custom prompt, the persona, or both — instead of sending
someone back to re-read a page they have already followed.
Truncation causes the same symptom, so it is still named, but second:
it only applies once the settings really are set.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NX2SsmUqQftWTZAY4BDuFa
The previous commit split failures into explained and unexplained, but the
split that matters is fixable and not. A request with no card, no greeting,
or nothing in it cannot come out of Janitor. Telling someone to "open the
chat until the bot's first message shows" is the dingus message wearing a
new coat: instructions for something they did not do and cannot undo.
Only the truncated card is a user's to fix, so only it is shown verbatim,
with the context-size advice. The rest are ImpossibleRequest now: the reply
says plainly that it is not their fault and there is nothing for them to
fix, and asks them to report it, carrying a short tag so the report says
which assumption broke rather than expecting the user to explain it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NX2SsmUqQftWTZAY4BDuFa
Every failure produced the same reply: read the directions, and check your
context size. For a card Janitor truncated that was fair. For a request
shape the user never chose, or for a bug in sucker, it blamed them for
something they could not have done anything about — and sent them back to
directions they had already followed.
Failures that can be explained now explain themselves: no card in the
request, no greeting in the chat, a card that arrived truncated (which
keeps the context-size advice, since that is where it belongs), and a
request with nothing in it. Anything else is a bug nobody anticipated, so
the reply says as much, says it is not the user's fault, and asks them to
DM @lyseverian on Discord — an unexplained failure nobody reports never
gets fixed. Internals are never echoed back.
SuckerError is recognised by name as well as by identity, because Next can
bundle a module into more than one chunk and a mismatched class would
quietly send every explained error down the unknown-bug path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01NX2SsmUqQftWTZAY4BDuFa
Severian