Summary: When people ask why they can’t “extract a story” from a raw error message, they usually miss the point. Some content—like a JSON error about insufficient account balance—isn’t a story at all. It’s a signal. And if your audience is developers, engineers, or product managers, how you handle that signal says everything about your brand’s attention to detail, clarity, and respect for their time.
When There’s No Story, Don’t Pretend There Is One
Let’s stop confusing a narrative with noise. The statement in question—“I apologize, but the text you provided does not appear to be a raw website text that contains a main story to be extracted and rewritten…”—reveals a common misstep: trying to force storytelling where it doesn’t belong.
Sometimes, no story is the story. That JSON snippet your customer support tool spit out? It was never meant for narrative extraction. It’s a transactional failure notice. And trying to reshape it into prose wastes time and muddies the message. This isn’t about lack of content. It’s about context—and misreading context causes real damage.
What’s Really Going On: Parsing the Real Signals
In the error message, what actually happened?
Someone submitted a block of JSON meant for backend systems and didn’t understand why it couldn’t be rephrased as human-readable narrative. The system responded with polite deflection—but what it could’ve done better was help the user understand the category error. Not every piece of content gets to become a blog, article, or FAQ. Some things exist to help machines talk to one another. Respect that boundary.
Why This Matters to Technical Brands
If you’re a company working with APIs, dev tools, cloud functions, or backend infrastructure, how your platform speaks when something goes wrong isn’t a side note. It’s a frontline brand asset.
- Don’t over-apologize. Not when the user did something wrong, like submitting malformed input. That doesn’t mean being rude—it means being accurate.
- Speak their language. Developers understand terms like “JSON payload,” “account balance error,” and “422 response.” Use those. Don’t sugarcoat.
- Clarify boundaries. Explain why something doesn’t translate. This builds trust faster than any bloated marketing language ever could.
The Power of ‘No’ in Systems Communication
Chris Voss said it best—“No” is where real conversations start. In machine communication, a clean “No” is not rejection. It’s empowerment. Telling someone that JSON can’t be rewritten into narrative is actually helping them fix the root issue—wrong input for the wrong tool.
So ask: “What outcome were you hoping for when submitting this input?” That moves you past surface-level confusion into genuine discovery. That’s real communication. That’s real tech support. And eventually, that’s real conversion—because you’ve behaved like a human who understands.
You Can’t Automate Judgment
Let’s be honest—what this whole thing uncovers is dependency on automation without judgment. Tools that take anything thrown at them and try to force output will collapse at scale. What AI, support systems, and documentation pipelines really need is structured fallback logic:
- If X is not narrative input → respond with clarification, not invention.
- If Y is malformed structure → offer format guidance, not apologies.
- If Z implies user confusion → invite next action, not canned regret.
This is where good UX, devrel, and tech content intersect. Solve the actual confusion rather than dancing around it with excess politeness or empty prose. Accurate silence beats inaccurate narration.
From Error Message to Brand Value
Every time your system speaks, it teaches your customer what kind of organization you are. When your platform says, “There’s nothing to extract here,” that’s not a failure—it’s an opportunity to reposition yourself as serious, focused, and developer-first.
And if you’re scared that saying “This isn’t a story” makes you sound cold or unhelpful, think again. It confirms the suspicion your engineers already have—that tech companies using prose as filler aren’t to be trusted. By calling out that there’s no story here, you actually prove that your tools are built by people who get it.
So What’s the Takeaway?
Not everything is content. Not every message is a moment for storytelling. And not every user misstep needs an apology. Knowing when not to repurpose or rephrase is a form of clarity too few brands practice.
Want to win with your developer audience? Use that error message as a teachable moment—about your system, your platform, and your philosophy. Say less, mean more, and never be afraid to walk away from empty narrative just to fill up a screen with something that sounds nice but does nothing.
#EngineeringCommunication #ErrorMessaging #TechSupportDoneRight #DevTools #APIDesign #HonestUX #ChrisVossTactics #UXWriting #NoIsPower #ClarityOverFluff
Featured Image courtesy of Unsplash and Chris Stein (RntP-d2cxys)
