You have raised it three times now. The tests, the commit messages, the habit of going quiet when a task gets difficult. Each time they nodded, and each time nothing changed. The temptation at this point is to say it a fourth time, louder, or to give up and start describing them as someone who does not take feedback.
Both of those skip the interesting question, which is why a reasonable person heard a reasonable request three times and did not act on it.
There are only a few answers, and they need different responses.
They did not understand what you were asking. This is the most common one by a distance, and it hides because people nod at things they half understood. Write better tests is a category, not an instruction. Replace it with one concrete example and a finish line. On the next pull request, add one test for the failure case as well as the happy path, and I will review it with you.
They disagreed and did not say so. Ask directly, and make it safe to answer. Is this something you think is wrong, or something you have not got to. If they do disagree, you now have a real conversation instead of a repeating one.
They agree and cannot. This is the one that most often gets misread as attitude. There is a deadline from someone else, a tool that makes it painful, a dependency they do not control. Ask what makes it hard, and listen to the answer as information about the system rather than an excuse.
They agree, intend to, and forget. Memory is not a process. Attach it to something that fires on its own. A checklist item, a pull request template line, a lint rule, a standing item in the review.
And consider the last possibility honestly. The note might be a preference of yours dressed up as a standard. If you cannot explain what goes wrong when it is ignored, it may not be worth a fourth conversation.
If it really is important and nothing shifts, stop repeating it and name the consequence once, calmly and specifically. Repetition without consequence teaches people that your feedback is weather. It arrives, and it passes.
– Asael Shinder
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