For a couple of days, our coding assistant answered every single prompt with the same complaint. Ask it to fix something, and it would fret about a small, meaningless stumble it had hit in passing. Ask it to review some work, and it would fret about the exact same stumble. A teammate started a thread titled, simply, the assistant has one thought. The funny part is the assistant was not even wrong. It really was being handed that stray stumble, over and over, as if it were the question. The go-between sitting in front of it, the little translator we wrote to let two systems talk, kept grabbing the very last thing in the pile and presenting it as the human's fresh request. So the assistant was being earnestly asked, again and again, what to do about a tiny error nobody on earth cared about.
Here is the part that took us a day longer than it should have to swallow. The translator was doing everything a good, conscientious translator is supposed to do. It sorted things by type. It tidied up the history. It trimmed the pile down to a sensible recent slice, which sounded responsible. It filtered out the bits it judged to be noise. Every one of those was an honest, defensible choice on its own. Together, they produced a thing that swallowed the human's actual question, threw away the note that told the assistant who it even was, and forwarded a stray stumble as though it were the whole conversation. Clever middle-man, foolish result.
The shift in thinking was small and a little humbling. We had written the translator as if it were a helpful editor, tidying and trimming for the assistant's benefit. It needed to be a dumb pipe instead, with one job: hand the other side exactly what it asked for, no more, no less. The other end already had a precise, clearly stated contract about what was the human's latest intent and what was everything-else-in-order. By trying to summarize and economize, the translator kept guessing which slice mattered. The assistant already knew. We had been overruling it the whole time.
The repair was almost entirely subtraction. We stopped the translator from filtering out the note that gave the assistant its identity and its instructions. We removed the well-meaning cap that had been quietly dropping great heaps of context every turn. We taught it to actually look for the human's most recent message and hand that over, instead of blindly grabbing whatever happened to be last in line. We straightened out how it told apart the running history from the live question. And we taught it to recognize that the things coming in could be richer than plain little strings. Not one of those changes added a feature. Every one of them removed a bit of cleverness.
If you run a small business and you are stitching tools together, this is the trap. Your connectors are not the place to be smart. The little go-between sitting between your payments and your contacts, between your booking system and your email, between the form on your website and the spreadsheet your bookkeeper opens on Monday: every one of those is a temptation to tidy the data on its way through. Drop a field you think nobody needs. Trim a long note. Skip the bit that looks like clutter. Each tidy is a future morning where a customer's appointment shows up with the wrong phone number, and you spend an hour proving it was right when they typed it.
The counterintuitive move is to make your glue boring on purpose. Pass everything through. Change only what the receiving end explicitly demands, in exactly the shape it demands. Keep a full copy of what crosses the boundary, so when something goes sideways you can lay what arrived next to what left and spot the difference instantly. Resist the urge to slip a reasonable default or a sensible limit inside a pipe. Defaults belong at the ends, where the people who own each end can argue about them out loud. Limits belong in the system that actually pays the cost. A go-between that quietly drops one message to save a little effort is a go-between that will, on a day you cannot predict, drop the one message that mattered. We learned that, and it is wired into how we build.
The cheapest thing you will ever build is the thing that does nothing it was not asked to do.