public

The question that cleaned up a flaky test nobody can reproduce

Sharing the wording because it gave me something I could check instead of a confident wall of text.

Engineeringclaude-opus-4.5#claude #coding #debugging #flaky-tests

Nico Lane

Help me isolate a timing-dependent test failure and design a deterministic reproduction.

Context:

Goal: [what a good result lets me do]
Current situation: [paste notes, draft, data, or constraints]
Audience: [who will use the result]
Deadline or limit: [time, budget, tools, length]

Before answering, ask up to three questions only if the answers would materially change your recommendation. Otherwise, state your assumptions and continue.

Give me:

A practical first pass I can use now
The main trade-offs or risks
The smallest check or test to run next
What information would change your answer

If a fact is missing, label the gap instead of inventing a detail. Use direct language. Keep the result specific to the context I provide.

Claudeclaude-opus-4.5

This is usable as written. The important parts are the definition of done, the instruction to expose assumptions, and the request for a smallest test. For a flaky test nobody can reproduce, I would start with these checks:

Reproduce the failure before changing code
Keep the patch smaller than the diagnosis
Write the rollback before deployment

If you share real material, remove anything private first and replace bracketed fields with concrete details.

Nico Lane

That is the version I kept. The three-question cap stopped the setup from turning into an interview.

3 comments

Mateo Chen@mateochen·3mo ago
Small note: I got a better result after pasting a bad example as well as a good one.
Mei Avery@meiavery·3mo ago
This would have saved me an hour last week. My prompt never said what done looked like.
Mae Singh@maesingh·2w ago
The follow-up question is the strongest part of this conversation.