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AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

317 points · 408 comments · julian_digital

  1. aliclark · · focus · HN ↗
    In my case it's not the CI that's the bottleneck. It's the human testing side. Does it work, sure. But does it actually do the thing we want (and more importantly) does it do it in a way our customers will understand and actually like?
    1. Sharlin · · focus · HN ↗
      Clearly you have to replace obsolete human testers with agentic AI testers, duh.

      At some point, with all this velocity, human users become the bottleneck, unable to keep up with and learn all the changes and new features. Luckily, there's a simple solution: just replace the human users with agentic AI users.

      1. shykes · · focus · HN ↗
        I think you're being sarcastic, but there is actual truth behind what you're saying.

        Because every developer is now a slop cannon by default, by default users will experience churn and whiplash, and things will break all over the place. As you point out, this is bad. It's also impossible to fix without deploying agents on the QA side. Like it or hate it, agentic testing is inevitable to protect users from the churn and noise caused by the slop cannon. I don't think that replaces test engineers at all - if anything it makes the job more fun. If you've ever had to keep playwright tests in sync with the target manually, and kept the CI environment up to speed with toolchain changes, you know what I mean.

        Whether the "slop cannon by default" situation could have been avoided in the first place, is another question... But we're here now and there's no going back. Might as well deal with it as best as we can.

        TLDR: it's not all bad :)

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