Method
Methodology
A case earns its place in the library when a real AI failure has enough citable evidence to be documented without invention.
The sourcing floor
Every case starts with at least one real, citable source. Synthetic cases are never published. Sources are recorded with a title, URL, and source type, then shown on the case file so the evidence remains visible alongside the editorial account.
Verification classes
Every case is labelled with how it was verified. The class is a statement about the evidence, not a ranking of how severe or important the failure was.
- Court-verified — Established through court records or legal filings.
- Public postmortem — The organisation published its own account.
- Incident database — Recorded in a recognised incident database.
- GitHub trail — Reconstructed from issues, commits, and maintainer discussion.
- First-hand account — Reported directly by someone involved, with corroborating detail.
How a case is structured
The order is fixed because it follows the sequence a practitioner debugging the same symptom needs: what happened, what signals to search for, what mechanism caused it, and what to do differently next time.
- Overview — what happened
- Context — the system, what was being built, and the expected result
- What failed — the observed behaviour
- Symptoms — searchable signals, phrased the way practitioners actually search
- Root cause — the real mechanism
- Technical explanation
- Contributing factors
- Attempted fixes — what was tried and did not work
- Lessons learned
- Prevention checklist — actionable items
- References — the cited sources
When the record is silent
Contributing factors and attempted fixes may be recorded as Not publicly documented when the public record is genuinely silent. That wording keeps a thin but real incident from being padded into something it is not. Padding a case is a failure of the method, not a stylistic choice.
What we don’t publish
Glitchive does not publish hypotheticals, reconstructions with no citable trace, or accounts that amount to naming individuals for blame. The library documents systems and mechanisms so practitioners can learn from them.
Corrections
Corrections are part of the record. See the corrections page for what can be corrected and how changes are recorded.