alt Hacker NewsAttributing these to "hidden requirements" is a slippery slope.
My own experience using Claude Code and similar tools tells me that "hidden requirements" could include:
* Make sure DESIGN.md is up to date
* Write/update tests after changing source, and make sure they pass
* Add integration test, not only unit tests that mock everything
* Don't refactor code that is unrelated to the current task
...
These are not even project/language specific instructions. They are usually considered common sense/good practice in software engineering, yet I sometimes had to almost beg coding agents to follow them. (You want to know how many times I have to emphasize don't use "any" in a TypeScript codebase?)
People should just admit it's a limitation of these coding tools, and we can still have a meaningful discussion.
Replies
Yeah I agree generally that the most banal things must be specified, but I do think that a single sentence in the prompt "Performance should be equivalent" would likely have yielded better results.
The training data is full of ‘any’ so you will keep getting ‘any’ because that is the code the models have seen.
An interesting example of the training data overriding the context.