Fwiw, that's not what the parent was talking about.

You're trying to middle road it. He was talking about actually treating it as a black box, so just give the model your expectations and goals it needs to meet, not tell it a rough solution for it to apply in detail.

Expectations and goals can be technically nonsensical. Agents have gotten really good, but they can’t magically solve intractable problems. If you’re out of your technical depth it can be easy to set unrealistic expectations without realizing it

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.

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

[delayed]