Does a calm bug report count as frustration?
Usually not: a matter-of-fact bug report reads as neutral, because the classifier flags a user who is unhappy with the assistant, and a calm description of a problem doesn’t show that.
The exception is repetition. A user re-asking after the assistant clearly failed counts, even in a flat tone. “My export button returns a 500” as the opening message isn’t even scored, since a conversation’s first two user messages never are. Typed again after two answers that didn’t fix it, the same sentence can flag.
Frustration and severity are still different signals. A calm report can point at a critical failure, and a furious message can be about something trivial, or about something outside the chat entirely, which never flags. Error-rate monitoring already catches thrown exceptions and failed tool calls. What this adds is the agent that’s technically working and still losing the user.
The limit: when a message is ambiguous, the classifier is told to call it neutral, so it misses some real frustration rather than flag calm users.