Methodology

How a diagnosis is produced.

We try to be specific about what the system does and doesn’t do so you can decide how much weight to put on its answers.

What the AI sees

Every diagnosis is a single call to the Anthropic Claude API. The request includes:

  • The photo of your failed print.
  • The printer model you selected (one of the 22+ printers in our supported list, plus “Other”).
  • The slicer and material you reported.
  • A structured system prompt that defines the output format — three ranked failure modes, each with a one-line cause and an actionable fix calibrated to the printer family.
  • A printer-context block: short, hand-curated facts about the specific printer’s common failure modes (open vs. enclosed, kinematics, AMS behavior, known-bad firmware combinations).

That’s the entire input. We don’t pull any external sources at request time, and we don’t use your past diagnoses to influence the next one.

Where it can be wrong

Image-based diagnosis isn’t infallible. The system is most reliable on:

  • Photos taken in even, indirect light.
  • Failures that are visible at print scale — first-layer issues, warping, stringing, layer shifts, under-extrusion, blobs.
  • Common consumer printers we have curated context for.

It’s less reliable on:

  • Internal failures invisible from the outside (heat creep, partial clogs that haven’t manifested visually yet, weak bonds inside infill).
  • Resin printers (we’re FDM-only at launch) and exotic kinematics.
  • Mixed failures where two unrelated problems happen on the same print.

Always verify suggested fixes against your printer’s documentation before flashing firmware, retensioning belts, or making other mechanical changes. The diagnosis is a starting point, not a service manual.

Privacy

Photos you upload are sent to the diagnosis API and discarded; we don’t store them. Diagnosis text and the metadata you provided (printer, material, slicer) are retained so we can keep tuning the system. Full details in the privacy policy.

How blog guides are researched

Every guide on this site is human-written and edited by Owen Drysdale. Sources lean on:

  • Manufacturer documentation: Bambu wiki, Prusa knowledge base, Creality model-specific docs.
  • First-hand experience from our print farm — ten-plus Bambu Lab and Creality machines running daily.
  • Patterns observed across r/3dprinting, r/BambuLab, r/prusa3d, r/ender3, r/FixMyPrint, and major Discord servers. We don’t cite individual posts because that information moves and disappears, but the patterns inform what gets covered.

Settings recommendations are tested before they ship, not invented in a chat window. When we hedge, it’s because the answer genuinely depends on conditions — material brand, ambient humidity, firmware version — that we can’t observe from a text article.

Corrections welcome

If a guide has incorrect specs, deprecated advice, or a claim that no longer matches current firmware behavior, email support@whyitfailed.fyi. Substantive corrections get a published edit and a fresh dateModified on the post.