Did anyone decide what your code won’t do?

You asked your agent for a small fix. It came back with a lock, a re-check, and a guard against an admin losing their rights mid-request. Nobody asked for any of it. Nobody decided against it either.

• THE EXTRAS · Sean Goedecke
  What requirements don’t you have? (opens in a new tab) · the best systems drop requirements on purpose, but coding agents add ones nobody asked for, so the prompt has to say what the code doesn’t need to guarantee
• THE ERROR · Troels Henriksen
  Integers - how ought they work? (opens in a new tab) · a language designer works through which integer cases deserve an error and which get a defined result, and why he’s in no hurry to change the answer
• UNDECIDED · Lorin Hochstein
  Thoughts on the July 8th Telstra outage report (opens in a new tab) · a skipped firmware update looked like a choice, but it may have been two groups holding different pictures of the same system
• NON-GOALS · Nirmit Meher
  The Non-Goals ARE the PRD (opens in a new tab) · a non-goal is a recorded decision, not a backlog item: we won’t do X because of Y, and we’ll revisit when Z
• THE POLICY · Will Larson
  Work the policy, not the exceptions. (opens in a new tab) · treat requests for exceptions as evidence and revise the policy on a schedule, instead of granting one-offs that wear down fairness