Then you're still middle-roading it from my perspective. Treating it as a black box means you're only specifying what comes out, essentially.
But to preempt a "I can't do that in my brownfield distributed monolith I'm maintaining at $dayjob": yes, that's why I said it may not be possible without refactoring.
In the black-box approach, how do you know what is a reasonable task to give it? Just ask the agent about that also?
I think we are talking past each other a bit? I’m curious about GP’s perspective here
My point is that you can ask for unrealistic outputs even if you’re treating the system as a black box. This is the classic case of higher level managers asking for infeasible results from their engineering team because they haven’t considered they’re trying to solve the wrong problem. Depends what you’re doing but I don’t think agents tend to push back on badly specified goals unless you’re proactive about it