Thread

1. aliclark · 1790022508 · 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. shykes · 1790024496 · focus · HN ↗

      Think of it as a layered problem. If the bottom layer (CI) cannot keep up with the output of agents, then solving problems at a higher layer - like user experience checks - will be exponentially slower and less reliable. Kind of like how optimizing tight inner loops makes your whole program faster.

      1. Sharlin · 1790024638 · focus · HN ↗

         Uh, no. If stage X is the bottleneck, it's immaterial how much you speed up stage Y.

         1. shykes · 1790025015 · focus · HN ↗

            You're assuming QA reviews won't be fully automated, and triggered from a CI pipeline.

            1. bluGill · 1790039284 · focus · HN ↗

               QA is not automatable. QA is about finding the things that you didn't think of and so didn't write a test for it. That many people think qa is not important shows in the bad software we have.

               1. Rapzid · 1790085641 · focus · HN ↗

                  Quality assurance can't be automated?

                  Quality assurance != Manual testing.

                  For all the vibe bros "!=" is "not equal"; a little programmer humor.

                  1. bluGill · 1790085899 · focus · HN ↗

                     No. You can automate some parts of it, but there are a lot of parts that cannot be.

                     What you cannot automate are finding the "unknown unknowns". That is things you don't know to look for. I have yet to see a project where humans running the automated tested code cannot find large large number of bugs that slipped passed all the automated tests that already pass.

                     You absolutely automate every test you can. It is boring and tedious to run through a manual test plan. What you want is to tell the testers "find what is wrong with it" and let them figure where/how to look. The act of finding new ways to try things is a large part of what makes manual testers better than automated tests.

                     1. Rapzid · 1790088757 · focus · HN ↗

                        AI can tell you things you don't know.

                        BTW, PR review is a flavor of quality assurance activity. People are arguing it can be replaced with AI review.

                        1. bluGill · 1790091139 · focus · HN ↗

                           AI is very useful in review, I won't put anything up for PR until it passes AI review. However AI is just a tool, it isn't magic. I still find a lot of things that AI missed when I review code.

                           AI can likely do a lot of QA work, but I still want a real human to test the code. At least code that humans are expected to use.

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