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I don’t enjoy writing unit tests but fortunately this is one task LLMs seem to be very good at and isn’t high stakes, they can exhaustively create test cases fo
by deadbabe 2y ago
I don’t enjoy writing unit tests but fortunately this is one task LLMs seem to be very good at and isn’t high stakes, they can exhaustively create test cases for all kinds of conditions, and can torture test your code without mercy. This is the only true improvement LLMs have made to my enjoyment.
- rileymichael 2y agoexcept they are not good at it. the unit tests you'll have written will be filled with (slow) mocks with tautological assertions, create no reusable test fixtures, etc.
- chamomeal 2y agoSounds just like human-written test suites lol
- rileymichael 2y agoof course — that’s what they’re trained on after all. most treat tests as a burden / afterthought, propagating the same issues from codebase to codebase, never improving. i wouldn’t consider those good either.
- layer8 2y agoSaying that writing unit tests isn’t high stakes is a dubious statement. The very purpose of unit tests is to make sure that programming errors are caught that may very well be high stakes.
- falcor84 2y agoHowever high the stakes are, a bug in test code is not as much of an issue as a bug in the production code.
- layer8 2y agoIt is as much of an issue if it prevents a bug in production code from being detected before it occurs in production. Which is the very purpose of unit tests.
- optimalsolver 2y agoWhat? Bugs in the test code are what lead to bugs in production code.
- falcor84 2y agoThat is exactly it. A bug in test code may or may not lead to a bug in production code, while a bug in production code IS a bug in production code