alt Hacker NewsDid anyone here actually look at the product they were actually building? It's an AI agent bug discovery product. Their whole culture is probably driven at a fundamental philosophical level about the problems of bug discovery. As he says: he wanted to rely on dogfooding - using their product as the way of spotting bugs.
That may have been spectactular naivete but it's not insanity.
The point I keep coming back to here that everyone is fighting me so hard on is that these blanket statements of: NO TESTS IS NUTS... absent of an understanding of the business context... is harmful.
What ends up happening is that your most fundamental features end up rotting because manual testing has biases. Chief among them is probably Recency Bias. It is in fact super easy to break a launch feature if it’s not gating any of the features you’re working on now. If you don’t automate those, yes, you’re nuts.
One of the worst ones I ever encountered was learning that someone broke the entire help system three months prior, and nobody noticed. Because developers don’t use the help system. I convinced a team of very skeptical people that E2E testing the help docs was a higher priority than automating testing of the authentication because every developer used that eight times a day or more. In fact on a previous project with trunk based builds, both times I broke login someone came to tell me so before the build finished.
Debugging is about doing cheap tests first to prune the problem space, and slower tests until you find the culprit. Testing often forgets that and will run expensive tests before fast ones. Particularly in the ice cream cone.
In short, if you declare an epic done with zero automation, you’re a fucking idiot.