Desk note
A failed transaction can still show the inner program
In April the circle read a failed swap beside two successful ones that looked alike in the header. The failed page still listed a fee payer, a fee in lamports, and a stack of log lines. The newcomer at the table had decided 'failed' meant 'ignore the rest'. The rest was where the page became useful.
The fee does not roll back
A failed Solana transaction still charges the network fee. The fee payer's lamports drop even when the token accounts return to their earlier amounts. If you are reconciling a payment, a failed retry can sit next to a successful attempt. The successful signature is the one whose token balances change. The failed signature is still a real line in the fee payer's history.
Logs are the part visitors skip because they look like machine speech. They are still readable at the level we need. A program invoke line names the program. A success or failure line says how that invoke ended. When an outer call fails, an inner instruction may already have been attempted. The inner list on the explorer is the place to check, not a guess from the red label alone.
What we write in the margin
Three blanks: fee payer, program named in the failing log, and whether any token balance actually changed. If the balances did not change, say so in a full sentence. 'Nothing happened' is too coarse, because the fee happened. 'The swap did not complete, and the fee still left the first signer' is a sentence you can repeat later.
The circle stays with public pages and does not try to repair a failed transaction. If the signature is yours and you want it read alone, the guided sitting is the quieter hour for that.