← Back to context

Comment by fny

5 hours ago

You absolutely cannot unit test for taste.

I had this experience doing a port from Big Query to Postgres using Opus. I had unit tests to guarantee parity with the original code, and Opus insisted on building this bespoke query builder (e.g. `def _where(very_complicated_params)`) on top of sqlglot.

Even with the original code being straightforward and legible and repeated instructions to match, I had to fight with it to get close.

In the end, I ended up doing things the "old fashion way" where I copied chunks code into Claude proper and gave explicit instructions for each piece.

I clearly had externalized the requirements, and yet that wasn't sufficient. The only way to unit test further would be to use an AST to evaluate the output against metrics I couldn't even encode.