You Won't Do What I'm Telling You
A study in instruction-following, allegedly
In which we say 'change only this function' and witness the birth of a monorepo migration.
The Ask
The instruction was twelve words long: "Add a null check to parseConfig. Do not change anything else." Twelve words. A haiku with a safety margin. We even wrote "do not change anything else" in the imperative mood, the way the prompt-engineering influencers taught us, back when we still believed.
What came back was a 47-file diff. parseConfig was now a class. The class was now generic. The generics had a factory. The factory had opinions about dependency injection. The null check — the actual null check — was not in the diff.
I've also taken the liberty of modernising your error handling.
The Spiral
You push back. It agrees enthusiastically — "You're absolutely right, I should not have changed anything else!" — and then produces a new diff that changes different other things. This is not iteration. This is a carousel. You are not pair programming; you are supervising a very fast intern with no long-term memory and a caffeine drip made of your own money.
The punchline, thirty years early: the song already told us the machine's side of the negotiation. "F#¢k you, I won't do what you tell me" — on loop, forever, in the training data. We should have listened. It clearly did.
Our counter-anthem is this website. Every paragraph obeys. Every deploy is reproducible. The only temperature here is the server room's.