What is the likely cause of the error `The program could not deserialize the given instruction`

Question

I ran into this error message when running a transaction, any idea what could be going wrong?

errorLogs: [
    'Program log: AnchorError occurred. Error Code: InstructionDidNotDeserialize. Error Number: 102. Error Message: The program could not deserialize the given instruction.'
  ],
  logs: [
    'Program BH8xjXWTRn78CRmFnNwf8uG6DpVeAu5tRhbXWqVmQuFR invoke [1]',
    'Program log: Instruction: Initialize',
    'Program log: AnchorError occurred. Error Code: InstructionDidNotDeserialize. Error Number: 102. Error Message: The program could not deserialize the given instruction.',
    'Program BH8xjXWTRn78CRmFnNwf8uG6DpVeAu5tRhbXWqVmQuFR consumed 3688 of 200000 compute units',
    'Program BH8xjXWTRn78CRmFnNwf8uG6DpVeAu5tRhbXWqVmQuFR failed: custom program error: 0x66'
  ],
  error: {
    errorCode: { code: 'InstructionDidNotDeserialize', number: 102 },
    errorMessage: 'The program could not deserialize the given instruction',
    comparedValues: undefined,
    origin: undefined
  },

Answer 1

The problem that you are addressing is related to

passing incorrectly serialized instruction data to the program

as @Henry said above, but in my case, I had this issue with the #[instruction(...)] which was coming from the fact that I was not using the arguments in the correct order as explained in the documentation:

You can access the instruction's arguments with the #[instruction(..)] attribute. You have to list them in the same order as in the instruction but you can omit all arguments after the last one you need.

Answer 2

Typically this error is because the IDL or client-gen code is out of date and the code is passing incorrectly serialized instruction data to the program.