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This problem has been around for a long time. Not only that but it would say this even when the problems were directly caused by their code.

I put a line in my CLAUDE.md that says "If a test doesn't pass, fix it regardless of whether it was pre-existing or in a different part of the code."

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This should be part of the system prompt. It's absolutely unacceptable to just to not at least try to investigate failures like this. I absolutely hate when it reaches this conclusion on its own and just continues on as if it's doing valid work.

Based on the recent leaks, their system prompt explicitly nudges the model not to do anything outside of what was asked. That could very well explain why it’s not fixing preexisting broken tests.

“Don't add features, refactor code, or make "improvements" beyond what was asked.”

https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/04/04/how-claude-code-builds-a...

And it's very valid. Because otherwise you would ask Claude to trim a tree and it would go raze the whole forest and plant new seeds. This was the primary pain point last year, especially with Sonnet.

Whatever prompting OpenAI has with Codex / GPT 5.4 seems superior here then.

It's very surgical and careful around incremental refactoring, etc. but it also doesn't avoid responsibility.

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