blast radius
[ blast REY-dee-uhs ]noun
How far a change can reach: every file and every behaviour it could possibly touch.
Explanation
Say it out loud in your prompt and the AI stays in its lane. Leave it unsaid and a one-line fix comes back wrapped in four hundred lines of tidying you never asked for.
Related words
- constraint block — The part of your prompt that says what the AI is not allowed to do: which tools, which files, which lines it must not cross.
- silent regression — A change that fixes the bug you reported and quietly breaks something nearby that was working fine.
Prompts that deal with it
- Security Boundary — AI will not guess your privacy rules
- Policy Recursion — Your database rule is chasing its own tail
- Stop Refactoring — You asked for one line, you got four hundred
- Hunt Regressions — Make it hunt for its own mistakes
- Reversible Migration — Every database change arrives with its undo