I have a feeling that our guidances should be worded better. Take this excerpt from the Help Center:
To the best of my knowledge, does the code work?
I believe this question is incorrect, as seen by https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/75043/c-youtube-downloader-error and there are most likely more questions around.
We should be asking people if, to the best of their knowledge, they think that their program works, not their code. We can see cases where people post code here that does compile and does not throw exceptions during runtime, yet does not do what is intended. So they conclude that their code works, but their program does not. We, as a general consensus, however require that their program works.
Hence my suggestion is to replace all occurrences of "does the code work" to "does the program work", wherever it makes sense. The obvious replacement would be in the Help Center in the excerpt listed above, perhaps there are more places where it should be changed.
This will not get rid of off-topic questions from users that do not read anything, but it will discourage users who know what they are doing and truly believe posting here is correct, because their code works in spite of their program not working.
