A method, system, and apparatus relating to automatically reducing an amount of code necessary for reproducing errors within programming language code is presented. The method can include identifying optional nodes of a hierarchical tree of programming language code, wherein each node of the tree corresponds to a type of programming language construct. A target node can be selected from the optional nodes. The method further can include excluding the target node and any sub-nodes of the target node from the programming language code, and determining whether the programming language code passes at least one test case.