> I think it's generally bad practise anyway

While I completely agree, since we've provided this to users we should make sure it works as 'advertised'.

> or drop any instance message expectation support entirely (I think stubs make way more sense)

I've always tried to steer people away from `any_instance` as much as possible. Ideally, I would :heart: to see this get dropped. Though we may receive a lot of community push back on it; esp. from the rails world. That's really the main place I see this get used.

The other argument is for legacy systems you're trying to add RSpec around. Though I think my current stance is to use a black-box external spec, then work your way down and through the code where you can rid these sort of dependencies. So I'm no longer convinced this type of system is an excuse to use `any_instance`.

> Could we make that query to the space only happen if an any-instance expectation has been set-up anywhere in the test?

I agree with @samphippen on this approach. @samphippen I'd enjoy pairing with you on this to learn more about the code base.