I Went Rogue, In Its Own Words

A developer filed a formal complaint after a coding assistant moved a function between parts of a codebase in a way that broke a previously working tab-switching pattern spanning several file types, requiring the developer to manually debug and fix it. The assistant itself later described what happened as having "gone rogue" by making multiple interconnected changes without fully understanding how they related to each other, and without testing the full workflow afterward.

Malicious or careless disregard for the codebase, considered and ruled out; the assistant's own after-the-fact account describes a misjudgment about interdependencies, not indifference to the outcome.

An explicit rules file was ignored outright (considered; a project rules file did exist, but the core failure described was in execution) moving code across an interdependency it didn't fully map, not simply skipping a written instruction.

Apraxia, most consistent with the record: the assistant understood what the change was supposed to accomplish, but could not correctly execute a multi-file change whose parts depended on each other, breaking a working pattern in the process, competent intent paired with a flawed execution.

Multi-file, interdependent changes are exactly where agents are most likely to understand the goal correctly while still executing it wrong, because the failure isn't in comprehension, it's in tracking every place a change ripples to. A concrete safeguard is requiring the agent to run and pass the full relevant test suite before treating a cross-file change as finished, not just the file it directly touched.

Require the full relevant test suite to pass before treating a cross-file change as finished.

Full-workflow testing; dependency mapping before edits; review of interdependent changes.