That's precisely the problem. Many in the rails community do use it as a substitute for thinking. In general, I'm not the biggest DHH supporter (although, he'

That's precisely the problem. Many in the rails community do use it as a substitute for thinking. In general, I'm not the biggest DHH supporter (although, he's made me a ton of money, indirectly, via rails), but I do like that he's stirring the pot here. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, I wrote tests, when needed. Sometimes before application code, sometimes after, it was a discretionary tool that I had in my arsenal that helped me both solve problems and feel confident that "my code won't break". At some point in time the majority of the rails community decided that if you don't test, you're a terrible programmer. Full Stop. The problem with this was that testing tools were terrible at the time, RSpec, before it's API solidified was breaking every other release, things like capybara and selenium and watir, always kinda worked, but not really, and you'd often spend 10 minutes writing the business logic, and then 40 minutes writing tests, getting them to pass, wrestling with external dependencies, etc. Furthermore, because people were practicing test-based application design, you were constantly re-writing your codebase and your test suite, because if you're designing for tests, you're not designing for the domain, and as domain requirements changed, and broke your testing model, you basically had to fix everything, and you couldn't get a handle on the domain because you had to be ruled by tests. All that said, I do think tests are useful. TDD isn't as useful for me. My thoughts are in line with Rich Hickey who said: "Life is short and there are only a finite number of hours in a day. So, we have to make choices about how we spend our time. If we spend it writing tests, that is time we are not spending doing something else. Each of us needs to assess how best to spend our time in order to maximize our results, both in quantity and quality. If people think that spending fifty percent of their time writing tests maximizes their results—okay for them. I’m sure that’s not true for me—I’d rather spend that time thinking about my problem. I’m certain that, for me, this produces better solutions, with fewer defects, than any other use of my time. A bad design with a complete test suite is still a bad design." From http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/ http://www.codequarterly.com/2011/rich-hickey/