I deleted a parameter from a constructor and ran gradle check inside IntelliJ.

While it was running, I remembered that I have code in the same module that calls the constructor I changed, but I forgot to drop the parameter I deleted. This should have failed to compile — so I was very surprised when gradle check succeeded.

Sure enough, I opened IntelliJ’s terminal and ran ./gradlew --no-daemon --no-build-cache clean check --rerun-tasks (doing everything I could think of to ensure everything gets rebuilt), and I got the build failure I was expecting.

So I went back inside IntelliJ and ran gradle check again, and this time it failed as expected.

Why might gradle check have succeeded the first time?

Hopefully irrelevant details:

• My code is all Kotlin.
• Nothing about this workflow involved merging in changes from other developers.
• The constructor I changed belongs to a Spring Boot controller.
• The call site that should have failed is in my AppConfig class, and I’m not using @Autowired — I’m explicitly creating the controller instance. In other words — there shouldn’t be any Spring magic going on.