My caution with recording is that I've found re-recording to get progressively hard/more brittle as time progresses, b/c the test system inevitably drifts furth

My caution with recording is that I've found re-recording to get progressively hard/more brittle as time progresses, b/c the test system inevitably drifts further and further from the state it was in when the test was first recorded: https://www.draconianoverlord.com/2018/06/20/skepticism-about-record/replay-tests.html/ https://www.draconianoverlord.com/2018/06/20/skepticism-abou... Granted, it creates more work, but personally I would follow the OP article's advice, and have your production code's tests only run against your in-memory fakes/stubs (which have no coupling to "this is the state of the external system when I happened to make the first recording"). And reserve the record/replays solely for testing your wrapper of the 3rd party API, with the rationale that "just testing the wrapper" will have lower coupling to "what the state of the external system is" vs. your ~10s/100s of production business cases that can be just assume the wrapper primitives like "save this user" / "create this user" work. this