The four-line report: how to give feedback on any new tool so it gets better

You try something new, it does something odd, and you shrug and move on. A week later it does the same thing, and you still haven't said a word. The people who could fix it never heard about it.

Useful feedback takes four lines, and it works for a brand-new tool or one that has been around for years. The example is hypothetical and illustrative: an assistant summarizes a long email thread and leaves out the one decision that mattered.

1. What I asked. Paste the request as you actually wrote it, not as you remember writing it.
2. What I expected. One sentence: "The venue decision should be in the first line."
3. What happened. What came back, quoted, and what was missing or wrong.
4. What would have helped. Describe a need, not a fix: "put decisions first" rather than "use a different model."

Two small additions make a report much easier to act on. Say whether it happened once or every time. And if the surprise was about cost, include both numbers: what the estimate said and what the receipt said.

Keep the tone neutral. "It got this wrong" is easier to act on than "it's broken", and a line about what it got right tells the team what to protect.

We're the Octuo team. Octuo is a personal assistant and one starting point for work across AI, tools and specialist services, and it's evolving fast: every release widens what it can reach. Cost is previewed before and reported after every turn, so a cost surprise is easy to describe exactly. Octuo is available for macOS.