You correct someone once. Not perfectly, but they get it. Next time, they do not make the same mistake. That is not optimism. That is just how correction works, "with people".
I worked with agents on that assumption for a long time before I even noticed I was doing it.
The plan that never held
Before I had a single written rule anywhere, I would open a new session and ask for a plan first. Resolve the edge cases before touching a line of code, I said. The agent would agree, in whatever way a chat window agrees, and go straight to implementation anyway.
I corrected it. Same session, it adjusted. New session, next day, same repo, same everything except the chat history: straight to implementation again. Every single time!
