Completeness

Completeness#

Completeness is the least glamorous dimension and the one candidates most often assume they have. It asks a blunt question: did you actually finish, and do you know that you finished?

The second half is the hard part. Plenty of candidates produce working code and cannot demonstrate that it works. In a round where a model wrote much of it, "it looks right" is not evidence of anything.

Reproduce before you fix#

This is the highest-value habit in the entire course, and it takes about ninety seconds.

Before changing anything, write the smallest thing that demonstrates the failure. In the session:

rl = RateLimiter(capacity=5, refill_rate=1)
allowed = sum(1 for _ in range(100) if rl.allow())
print(allowed)   # prints 100, should be about 5

Four lines. Look at everything it bought:

• An oracle. After the fix, this either prints 5 or it does not. No judgment call, no "seems better."
• Prompt content. "Returns True 100 times when I expected about 5" is the most useful sentence in the prompt that follows.
• A named target. You are no longer hunting a vague misbehavior; you are explaining a specific number.
• Insurance against a wrong diagnosis. If your fix is wrong, you find out in four seconds instead of at minute thirty-eight.