Find out what's already broken
Before you ask for a change, know what worked and what didn't.
Oct 31, 2026 · 1 min read
A review found a bug while checking a size limit I’d just added. If an email’s text contained {attachment}, the attachment got copied into the AI prompt twice, 97k characters against a 60k limit.
My change didn’t cause it. The bug was older than the PR, my new limit just exposed it. Without knowing that, I could have spent the whole session blaming the wrong code.
The habit
Before any change, get a baseline: what’s there, what passes and what already fails. Then a new failure is yours and an old one is just old, and the agent can’t hide one behind the other.
If something fails later, run it on your main branch too. If it fails there as well, it isn’t your change.
Try it
Inspect this project without changing anything. Explain what exists, how to run it, and which checks pass or fail right now. Report actual output. Do not implement yet.