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Ditching the QA team when the single highest challenge is verifying that vibe-coded systems do what they're meant to is extraordinarily short-sighted. Persona
by simonw 6mo ago
Ditching the QA team when the single highest challenge is verifying that vibe-coded systems do what they're meant to is extraordinarily short-sighted.
Personally, the more time I spend working with coding agents the least worried I am for my career. Getting the best results out of them is really hard. They amplify existing skills and experience, so the more experience you have the better.
- kenloef 6mo agoI believe that many of those saying that they "never write code anymore" or are experiencing "10x productivity," are heavily underestimating (or outright misrepresenting) how much they are guiding the model, and ignoring everything else that goes into shipping fit for purpose software. I frequently see zero measurements or factual arguments supplied to support such claims. I also see many people say that they are "vibe coding," when they are almost certainly reviewing, editing, or otherwise steering the output. I wonder why there is such a mad dash to trump up the capabilities of coding agents. And why such loose terminology and lack of rigor? I thought programmers were supposed to be rational people (har har!)
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- koonsolo 6mo agoHave you seen the automated tests that QA members deliver? My experience is that they are horrible, and it's not so hard to beat that low quality bar with an LLM. I have a theory: if they were good at writing automated tests, they would have been developers instead of QA engineers. Not saying that there aren't any high quality QA engineers, I worked with some. But LLM's raised the bar in a way that most QA engineers can't reach.
- Mashimo 6mo agoHuh, never thought about QA writing unit tests. In my limited experience they write test cases, test each story, do regression test, verify bugs from customers. All by hand. At my current job I don't want to miss them.
- koonsolo 6mo agoThey test everything manually and don't have any automated end-to-end tests? That basically proves my point ;).
- simonw 6mo agoYeah, I don't think the role of QA is to write automated tests - developers should be doing most of that work. The best QA people I've worked with didn't write much code at all. You'd give them a new system and they'd find all of the bugs, testing obscure edge-cases that you'd never thought of.