"One of the most essential practices for maintaining the long-term quality of computer code is to write automated tests that ensure the program continues to act as expected, even when other people (including your future self) muck with it."

That's such a great condensation of why automated tests are worthwhile.

"To write your own testing framework based on continuation trees, all you need is a stack of databases (or rather, a database that supports rolling back to an arbitrary revision)."

PostgreSQL and SQLite and MySQL all support SAVEPOINT these days, which is a way to have a transaction nested inside a transaction. I could imagine building a testing system on top of this which could support the tree pattern described by Evan here (as long as your tests don't themselves need to test transaction-related behavior).

Since ChatGPT Code Interpreter works with o3-mini now I had that knock up a very quick proof of concept using Python and SQLite SAVEPOINT, which appears to work: https://chatgpt.com/share/67d36883-4294-8006-b464-4d6f937d99...