If you maintain a project, work in devrel or sit in a support rotation, you already know the problem a text expander with multiple variations solves. The same five questions arrive every week, and the same canned reply pasted under each of them starts to look like a bot wrote it. People notice. A reporter who gets the identical "please provide a minimal reproduction" block that was posted on the last forty issues feels processed, not helped.

This post is about a small change that made my canned replies feel human again: keeping several versions of a reply under one shortcut, and choosing the right one at the moment I need it.

The problem with one canned reply per situation

Most of us start with a flat list. One snippet for "needs repro", one for "duplicate", one for "thanks for the PR". It works for a while. Then you notice three things:

The tone is wrong half the time.…