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0 pointsandy_ppp2mo ago0 comments

I honestly find AI quite poor at writing good well thought through tests, potentially because:

1. writing testable code is part of writing good tests

2. testing is actually poorly done in all the training data because humans are also bad at writing tests

3. tests should be more focused around business logic and describing the application than arbitrarily testing things in an uncanny valley of AI slop

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theshrike792mo ago

When Vibe coding/engineering I don't think of tests in the same way as when testing human written code.

I use unit tests to "lock down" current behavior so an agent rummaging around feature F doesn't break features A and B and will get immediate feedback if that happens.

I'm not trying to match every edge case, but focus more on end to end tests where input and output are locked golden files. "If this comes in, this exact thing must come out the other end." type of thing.

The AI can figure out what went wrong if the tests fail.

andy_pppOP2mo ago

Yeah, I need to start accepting to some degree the world has changed - in the past when I want to understand a system I'd have read the tests, but with AI I can just ask cursor to explain what the code is doing and it's fairly good at explaining the functionality to me.

I'm not sure I feel truly comfortable yet with huge blocks of code that are not cleanly understood by humans but it's happening whether I like it or not.

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