Isn’t this how all software development works? Folks commit code, it’s tested, and reviewed, and then deployed.
Why would this be any different?
Why would this be any different?
Folks think, they write code, they do their own localized evaluation and testing, then they commit and then the rest of the (down|up)stream process begins.
LLM's skip over the "actually verify that the code I just wrote does what I intended it to" step. Granted, most humans don't do this step as thoroughly and carefully as would be desirable (sometimes through laziness, sometimes because of a belief in (down|up)stream testing processes). But LLM's don't do it at all.
Makes me honestly wonder — will AGI just give us agents that get into bad moods and not want to work for the day because they’re tired or just don’t feel like it!
It obviously adds to the discussion: paid and non paid accounts are being conflated daily in threads like these!
They’re not the same tier account!
Free users, especially ones deemed less interesting to learn from for the future, are given table-scraps when they feel it’s necessary for load reasons.
More specifically: One side is talking about apples,
and the other is talking about mushy old apples,
that sometimes you need to wait 12 hours for.
All users are stakeholders.
They’re emphatically not considered customers.
We can disagree with that, create legal protections for those people - but that doesn’t make them customers to OpenAI, Anthropic, et al.
I'm not sure where this idea comes from. Just instruct it to write and run unit tests and document as it goes. All of the ones I've used will happily do so.
You still have to verify that the unit tests are valid, but that's still far less work than skipping them or writing the code/tests yourself.
It also doesn't necessarily rewrite documentation as implementation changes. I've seen documentation code rot happen within the same coding session.
I've started to add an instruction to my GEMINI.md after I'm happy with the tests telling it not to edit them, but to still run them.
I solve the documentation issue the same way. By telling it when and what to update in the .md file.
That's what the author did when they ran it.
Last month, I made a minor change to our own code and verified that it worked (it did!). Earlier this week, I was notified of an entirely different workflow that had been broken by the change I had made. The only sort of automated testing that would have detected this would have been similar in scope and scale to the ProTools test harness, and neither an individual human nor an LLM is going to run that.
Moreover, that workflow was entirely graphically based, so unless Claude Opus 4.5 or whatever today's flavor of vibe coding LLM agent is has access to a testing system that allows it to inject mouse events into a running instance of our application (hint: it does not), there's no way it could run an effective test for this sort of code change.
I have no doubt that Claude et al. can verify that their carefully defined module does the very limited task it is supposed to do, for cases where "carefully defined" and "very limited" are appropriate. If that's the only sort of coding you do, I am sorry for your loss.
FWIW that's precisely what https://pptr.dev is all about. To your broader point though designing a good harness itself remains very challenging and requires to actually understand what value for user, software architecture (to e.g. bypass user interaction and test the API first), etc.
my world is native desktop applications, not in-browser stuff.
That being said mouse events and similar isn't hard to do, e.g. start with a fixed resolution (using xrandr) then xdotool or similar. Ideally if the application has accessibility feature it won't be as finicky.
My point though was just to show that testing with GUI is not infeasible.
Apparently there is even a "UI Testing for devs & agents" https://www.chromatic.com which I found via Visual TDD https://www.chromatic.com/blog/visual-test-driven-developmen... I can't recommend this but it does show even though the person I was replying with can't use Puppeteer in their context the tooling does exist and the principles would still apply.
Indeed, which is why I mentioned the ProTools test harness and the fact that it took 6 people a year to write and takes a week to run (or took a week, at some point in the past; it might be more or less now).
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agents-and-tools/tool-us...
Although if you want to test a UI app, it's better to do it through accessibility APIs rather than actually looking at the screen and clicking.