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I agree it would be cool, and occasionally useful, but I think overall such a tool would be a negative. The goal of boiling down code to the smallest, most portable example which demonstrates the problem isn't just to get more effective help. It's a vital step in isolating the issue, and when duly used, often results in the problem being found without help. Furthermore, it gives answers the quality of being more useful to those who find the question later. That's because while two actual pieces of code that have the same bug will appear almost unrelated, their simplest reductions will bear similarity to each other.

I think adoption of a tool that just lets one share their dev environment would discourage this sort of due diligence, and encourage the useless "here's a dump of my code please fix it"-type questions.



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