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Comment by lispisok | Hacker News Reader

I think most of this is good stuff but I disagree with not letting Claude touch tests or migrations at all. Handing writing tests from scratch is the part I hate the most. Having an LLM do a first pass on tests which I add to and adjust as I see fit has been a big boon on the testing front. It seems the difference between me and the author is I believe whether code was generated by an LLM or not the human still takes ownership and responsibility. Not letting Claude touch tests and migrations is saying you rightfully dont trust Claude but are giving ownership to Claude for Claude generated code. That or he doesn't trust his employees to not blindly accept AI slop, the strict rules around tests and migrations is to prevent the AI slop from breaking everything or causing data loss.

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True but, in my experience, a few major pitfalls that happened:

1. We ran into really bad minefields when we tried to come back to manually edit the generated tests later on. Claude tended to mock everything because it didn’t have context about how we run services, build environments, etc.

2. And this was the worst, all of the devs on the team including me got realllyy lazy with testing. Bugs in production significantly increased.

Did you try to put all this (complex and external) context to the context (claude.md or whatever), with intructions how to do proper TDD, before asking for the tests? I know that may be more work than actual coding it as you know all it by heart and external world is always bigger than internal one. But in long term and with teams/codebases with no good TDD practises that might end up with useful test iterations. Of course developer commiting the code is anyway responsible for it, so what I would ban is putting “AI did it” to the commits - it may mentally work as “get out of jail card” attempt for some.

we tried a few different variations but tbh had universally bad results. for example, we use `ward` test runner in our python codebase, and claude sonnet (both 3.7 and 4) keep trying to force-switch it to pytest lol. every. single. time.

maybe we could either try this with opus 4 and hope that cheaper models catch up, or just drink the kool-aid and switch to pytest...

I literally LOLed at #2, haha! LLMs are making devs lazy at scale :)

Devs almost universally hate 3 things:

1. writing tests;

2. writing docs;

3. manually updating dependencies;

and LLMs are a big boon wrt to helping us avoiding all 3, but forcing your team to pick writing tests is a sensible trade off in this context, since as you say bugs in prod increased significantly.

yeah, this might change in the future but I also found that since building features has become faster, asking devs to write the tests themselves sort of demands that they take responsibility of the code and the potential bugs

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