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> The cost of shoring up behavior with tests ahead of a restructure has gone down because of AI. Yes. But the ease of not doing that and instead just getting
by majormajor 4mo ago
> The cost of shoring up behavior with tests ahead of a restructure has gone down because of AI.
Yes.
But the ease of not doing that and instead just getting a brittle set of three-quarters-baked tests is extremely high! And many people seem happy to go from "a few human-written mediocre brittle tests" to "a bunch of AI-written mediocre brittle tests" because it is an objective improvement and the people who weren't avoiding speculative structure and looking for the write boundaries before are happy to also not do so no.
So completely agree with the "take advantage of the tools this way" but I also wouldn't claim it's a reason to no longer worry about if you're building the wrong castles in the sky too early, because perfect refactor-proof testing contracts are still usually pretty hard to design.
- phamilton 4mo ago> perfect refactor-proof testing contracts are still usually pretty hard to design Not sure about hard, but definitely rare and we as an industry are under-skilled in these areas. We have decades of research and tools for testing and verification of software. Property tests, dependent types, formal verification and proof, etc. The paths have been there, we have just collectively prioritized other things. It requires an intentional shift in how we design and build. That shift is the harder part.